Part Two — The Missing Middle: What Nobody Is Responsible For
In Part One (just last week!), I looked at what America’s cinema-support organizations say they are here to do. Yup: the pattern was pretty clear. We have built substantial infrastructure around developing artists, developing projects, and improving the prospects for a project’s financing. That’s the front end. We are pretty good on the back end too: premiering films, celebrating or awarding them, and doing a somewhat decent job of connecting movies to audiences too.
That is a damn lot, and yes, we sure appreciate it. We need to color in this square, though. We — and our cinema-support orgs — are letting crucial elements go, acting like they are not theirs or our business. We know it is a myth that if we build it, they will come — but yet we still behave like it is some commandment.
Yet, we don’t follow another law that could really bring us all together. The Rule Of The Samurai is that if you save someone’s life, you have to forever save their life, or at least die trying. If we launch films but don’t prepare them to protect themselves, aren’t we just leading the lambs to slaughter?
Who counsels filmmakers on how best to retain some ownership? Why do we let them shoot a film when they haven’t a clue how to build an audience? Or raised a penny for marketing? Do they even know what sort of performance data they should seek before those learnings gets locked away? Do they know how to archive their film for posterity (and revenue)? Ever wonder why capital rarely circles back to finance the next film? Get the picture? It’s empty in the center of the chain.
That empty stretch of highway needs Sherlock sleuthing it. It is The Case Of The Missing Middle of American Independent Cinema. If we want a sustainable cinema culture, we’d better start coloring in this blank space.
Follow The Film
Got your crayons? Let’s draw the current industry-standard path as:
Develop the artist → Develop the project → Finance the production → Make the film → Own the rights → Sell or license it → Distribute it → Exhibit it → Find the audience → Retain the audience → Generate revenue → Return capital → Sustain the artist → Finance the next work
Now sketch where our institutional density sits. At the front end, there is plenty: labs, grants, mentors — and plenty more besides. At the audience-facing end, there is a plethora too: festivals, nonprofit cinemas, awards, and all the surrounding activity.
But get into the middle and our whole house is a-shaking and tremblin’. Who is helping the filmmaker retain rights? Or the proceeds — including data and the lifetime value of the first users their film brings in? It is not just her lawyer; we need to help the artist see what is needed to be a successful entrepreneur. Who is building the distribution avenues that we let rust during the forty-year “indie” boondoggle? You know, the college, corporate, and legislative tours? The educational curriculum? The collectors’ edition box sets? The grails every film generates but doesn’t monetize? Beyond all that, who is helping the artist keep the audience relationship, learn to use it for leverage, and carry some value forward into the next wannabe masterpiece? Why do we have a legion of folks who seem to think this isn’t their job — when it could be, should be, and would be if we could think a bit clearer?
That is the Missing Middle: the part where value gets created, captured, converted, and too often carried off by others. And it is the part where our collective support capacity gets all too thin. Some organizations are lifting pieces of it — as we’ll see later — but we have built nothing close to the institutional density that we focused on in the nineties — where our orgs seem still stuck. Isn’t it time we — or some of us — moved on from the limited focus on development, production, and festivals?
So where exactly is the blank space? I see places where the crayons barely seem to touch the page.
Seven places our cinema ecosystem’s collective support orgs need to begin to address right now
1. Ownership
Start with the biggie. Filmmakers spend years creating intellectual property, building cultural value, and dragging an audience toward something that did not exist before they made it. Then, after all that labor, we somehow become remarkably casual about whether the artist owns much of anything when the smoke clears.
Copyright is part of it, of course, but the question goes much farther. Who controls the remake rights if somebody comes calling years later? Who benefits when the film is rediscovered, reissued, repackaged, remade, or otherwise finds another life? Who controls the elements that might generate the next dollar, or the next work? These questions are often treated as deal points to be negotiated after the financing has been assembled, when they ought to be part of the artist’s education long before the first dollar arrives. And on their ledger when it does.
I suspect you know where I come down on this. If artists create the asset, they should have a meaningful chance to participate in the upside. Creative development should include economic development. Some filmmakers will still choose to sell everything, and fine, but let the decision be informed, intentional, and strategic rather than the default price of admission. Or really… No. We can’t sell ourselves into indentured servitude and we shouldn’t be able to sell off the future of our work. Ah… if only we had an Artists Bill Of Rights.
We cannot keep calling work “independent” while training artists to surrender the very assets that might make them less dependent the next time around.
2. Distribution Infrastructure
We have spent decades building labs for filmmakers. Where are the labs for distributors?
America still has more than 100 theatrical distributors, and some are terrific, some are better than a kick in the head, and others appear to be surviving on nerve and fumes. But the larger question is what we have built around them. Where is the support for emerging distributors, new circulation models, and the people trying to make the trip from film to audience less expensive and less dependent on a handful of familiar channels?
Distribution used to mean far more than getting a few theatrical dates and hoping somebody bought the rest. Films toured colleges and corporations, played community groups, moved through educational channels, generated specialty editions, and found all sorts of ways to create value outside the one-shot acquisition model. A lot of those pathways rusted while we spent forty years polishing the front end.
Some organizations are already doing meaningful work here. The Film Collaborative, Women Make Movies, Firelight Media, Black Public Media, ITVS, ARRAY and others have built pieces worth learning from. Good. Part Five will show that distribution is not quite as empty as I first thought. The problem is that we still do not have enough shared capacity, training, capital, tools, and connectivity to make those pathways widely available.
I built a distribution planning template because none of the support orgs offered one. That may be useful, but should every filmmaker really need to invent their own roadmap while the rest of us keep saying “think about distribution earlier”? If production keeps growing while circulation keeps shrinking, we know what happens next: traffic jam. And then comes the pile up. It’s bigger than a crash. It is the American version of Godard’s Weekend.
3. Audience Ownership
Here is another big blank space of neglect that we have somehow trained ourselves to accept.
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