The First Five Recommended Best Practices For Our New & Improved Cinema Ecosystem: Stop Repeating The Repeating
We started by asking what the Film Support Orgs said their mission was. We’ve identified the Missing Middle of issues that no one was taking responsibility for.. We’ve asked our support organizations where they might raise their hands to solve this. Now comes the part that may determine whether any of this actually sticks: how do we build an ecosystem that learns, improves, and carries value forward?
You may have caught that I called this the “First Five”. There is a second five too. That is going to look at how we make the ecosystem function as an ecosystem. So together, I have ten RBPs for you in this ongoing series of posts. This first grouping though has been a particular stick in my craw for some time now. Even when we spot some is wrong or broken or just doesn’t work, we stay at for a longlong time. What’s up with that? We know that until the pain of the present outweighs the fear of the future very little changes. We know that change is slow (until it isn’t). It seems we do little to rectify this though, doesn’t it?
I think this is also where you see my enthusiasm for newsletters; our filmmaking community generates an extraordinary amount of knowledge — but for decades we’ve never bothered to harvest it. Every release teaches us something about audiences, every organization learns something about what support actually works, and every production discovers some new way of solving an old problem. Yet too often that knowledge remains in somebody’s head, buried in a hard drive, or walks out the door when the person who learned it moves on or gives up.
We are spending far too much time rediscovering what our community already knows. Many keep knowledge to themselves because they were fooled into thinking it gives us some additional power. Sharing our combined knowledge however accelerates us all beyond prior thresholds. It is time to unleash this superpower.
NonDē needs memory. It also needs a commitment to turn that memory into operational improvements: better systems, smarter standards, shared resources, and processes that make the next film easier to finance, distribute, exhibit, and sustain.You with me. Can you hear the rallying cry?
If our ecosystem learns something useful, our strategy should be to capture it, share what we can, and put it to work. That’s the song I’ve been singing on this newsletter and it is time to adopt a few bars, yeah?
Here are five recommended best practices for our new and improved cinema ecosystem I have to offer today, focused on that specific practice of collectively looking how to escape from Square One.
1. Capture Institutional Knowledge — And Share It
Every support organization accumulates knowledge through the many routes of success, failure, experimentation, and plain old experience. The trouble is that we rarely treat what gets learned as an asset that the wider community should inherit. It is time to recognize this as a shared natural resource and not a rare jewel for single individuals to hoarde.
Every program and film release leaves somebody knowing more than they knew before. Sometimes the biggest lesson comes from what worked, but plenty of the really useful stuff comes from what cost too much or simply failed to deliver to expectations. Why should that tuition be paid again and again by the next cycle of filmmakers?
Obviously, some information must remain confidential. Fine. But confidentiality has too often become a convenient cover for a system in which everybody repeatedly discovers the same truths on their own dime. Smell that sucky situation?
Imagine if our festivals, funders, and distributors routinely produced and published useful postmortems that focused on what was learned rather than merely what was celebrated. Filmmakers could do the same where appropriate, and over time we would start building a living body of practical knowledge that gets richer with use rather than disappearing down institutional memory holes.
Knowledge kept in silos depreciates. Knowledge shared can compound. That is exactly the kind of accelerating value NonDē will create.
2. Make Operational Improvements Part Of The Mission
Orgs talk endlessly about creative innovation. The same goes on here in the newsletter realm. Isn’t it time to bring some of that appetite for invention to the way the business actually functions?
Our ecosystem keeps encountering the same friction and acting as if enduring it is simply part of making movies. Why? Somebody should be looking at the recurring headaches and deciding that reducing them is part of the mission. It is doable and surely would lift some gloom.
Every cinema-support organization could ask itself annually: What did we make easier, cheaper, fairer, or more effective for our community this year? That measure may tell us more about progress than another count of workshop attendance. Each filmmaker could make it part of their own greenlight process.
Operational improvements do not always look sexy. Nobody gets photographed on a red carpet because they fixed an accounting workflow or improved the formatting of a call sheet. The cinema gods know, however, how much time, money, and misery better systems could save and, boyo boyo, doe it makes them smile widely.
And when somebody does figure out a better way, let’s share it, stat! The strategy should be to reduce repeated reinvention and redirect all that saved energy back toward the art. It only took fifteen years to get more than 3% of filmmakers to start to recognize that distribution and marketing needed to be their responsibility too.
3. Standardize What Should Never Need Reinventing
Every film is different, but the back office does not need to be.
Once we solve a recurring problem well, the answer should not disappear with the production that paid to discover it. Better reporting practices, clearer workflows, and common approaches to recurring business tasks can save the next filmmaker from rebuilding machinery that should already exist.
I am going to go even further. We could standardize the entire system of how things were reported and stop pretending incomprehensibility is some inevitable feature of the film business. The more we can standardize, the more we can build, and the better we will build it.
This should become one of our basic operating principles: standardize what can be standardized so we can devote more of our collective energy to what should remain singular: the art.
A healthy ecosystem gives people common tools and practices where they make sense. Otherwise, every filmmaker winds up paying again for a solution somebody else already paid to discover.
That is expensive independence. NonDē should be smarter than that.
4. Fund Infrastructure With The Expectation That It Too Will Travel
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