Today is my birthday, so I am taking liberty to share a THIRD post with you today. I admit that with this one engaged some “help” to draft this post.

And I will also use this excuse to bring back a tradition too. For the next 48 hours new financial supporters (i.e. paid subscribers) can secure an annual subscription to HopeForFilm for 50% off. So if you are on the free pass, upgrade now. Just use this link:

https://www.hopeforfilm.com/TedsBirthdayGift

In the FKATheFilmBiz, even the language can mean one thing and its opposite simultaneously. So little is actually said, many meetings become exercises in futility. Many a post too. I don’t know about you, but it is starting to feel a bit like eternal deja vu around these here parts. So many writers are using AI, the world gets a bit flat.

But why beat them, if you can join them? Yes, I am talking about the sort of AI-assisted writing that proliferates here on Substack. I thought I would give it a go with this one — it being my bday and all — and see if I could up the game by playing with alliteration, palindromes, acronyms, contronyms, and a sprinkling of ambiguity. Yeah, and that picturegram at the top too. My hope was I could get a post that may resemble a typical HopeForFilm post only with all that extra flare.

This is what I would do, if I was my evil twin and had the opportunity to do a HFF Takeover. So what’s in here? If you are keeping score :

• Total deliberate wordplay units: 96

• Distinct types of verbal play: 20

Can you find them all? And do you have a favorite? Do you need the cheat code? And dang it: I wanted to make it a hundred. Failed again!

The Preposterous Proliferation Of People Preventing Pictures

by Ted (and his AI chatbot buddy)

There was a time when making a movie supposedly required a camera, some cash, a cast, a crew, and enough collective conviction to keep everyone moving when common sense suggested otherwise. We seem to have decided that was far too simple.

Now we have process people, platform people, pitch people, packaging people, positioning people, and plenty of other professionals whose primary participation appears to be preparing us for participation by still more professionals. The pictures themselves? They wait.

Perhaps this is progress. Perhaps it is piffle. Perhaps we have all fallen prey to P.A.S.S.: Permission Acquisition Submission Syndrome, that peculiar condition in which the more people who need to approve the work, the more legitimate we imagine the work has become.

Never odd or even. That’s a palindrome. It is also a pretty fair description of how much of SC-Indie Film now gets financed.

We want work that is bold but bankable, fresh but familiar, original but reassuringly comparable to something somebody else already made money on. We pursue proven unpredictability, radical reliability, and fresh familiarity—and then wonder why so much of what comes out feels familiar, reliable, and not especially unpredictable.

Quite the conundrum. And isn’t conundrum a marvelous word? It already sounds like a problem you have to crawl under.

We say we want filmmakers to home in on what makes their work distinctive, although by the time everyone has honed in on the market positioning, the distinction can become considerably less distinct. For all intensive purposes, perhaps the misuse is more accurate than the actual phrase. Development can get pretty intensive, and after enough notes the filmmaker’s original intent may no longer serve much purpose.

Meanwhile, the filmmaker is advised to perfect the pitch before making the picture, build the package before building the practice, and populate the portal before proving the proposition. Pitch the pitch, package the package, develop the development, finance the financing, market the marketing, and eventually perhaps someone somewhere will allow us to make the movie.

Pitch, twitch, switch, ditch. Less a rhyme than a development trajectory.

Then comes another deck. A deck about the deck, no doubt, perhaps accompanied by a consultant retained to clarify why the previous consultant’s deck failed to sufficiently articulate the strategic implications of the strategy. Our ecosystem has gotten awfully good at adding apparatus without adding access.

We keep talking about the principles behind sustainable cinema while ensuring that the principals still get paid first. Funny how one little letter can contain an entire business model.

English can do even better. Oversight can mean careful supervision or completely failing to notice something. Both definitions have enjoyed remarkably long careers in the FKATheFilmBiz. Sanction can mean approval or punishment, allowing someone to sanction your strategy without specifying whether congratulations or condolences are in order.

Words themselves have apparently adopted the dealmaking ethos.

We have gatekeepers guarding gatekeepers, middlemen managing middlemen, and meetings whose most measurable outcome is another meeting. Filmmakers fill forms for funds while financiers finesse forecasts, programmers ponder positioning, and somewhere beneath all that professionalized palaver somebody is still trying to get a damn picture made.

The whole enterprise can become a rigmarole wrapped in a kerfuffle, seasoned with gobbledygook and served with a side of bureaucratic brouhaha. Say those words aloud. They know what they are.

And since we have already abandoned linguistic dignity, here is a considerably more committed palindrome:

“Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.”

It is roughly as comprehensible as certain recoupment schedules I have received. They get you both coming and going in this circle game.

The real problem is that all this nonsense is costly. Every added intermediary needs payment, participation, protection, or a precious little piece of the pie, and the result is often value vanishing while fees flourish. Money trickles, fees tickle, budgets buckle, and eventually something goes clunk.

We have mistaken complexity for sophistication and friction for rigor. Worse, our strategy often makes it harder to practice the very behaviors we say we want: experimentation, ownership, audience engagement, sustainable careers, and much more.

Want innovation? Fill out the form. Want risk-taking? Show us the comps. Want originality? What successful movie is it exactly like?

By the time somebody announces that an unresolved question is a mute point, the filmmaker may indeed have stopped talking.

Occasionally the language gets scrambled altogether. A producer may promise to fight the good fright, which is probably a spoonerism, although in our business it can also feel like a mission statement.

Then comes the malapropism: someone proudly announces that the project has been received with great antipathy when they mean great enthusiasm.

Sometimes, given the notes, they may accidentally be right.

The funding process is frequently phased in ways designed to leave filmmakers increasingly fazed. Rights may be waived while everyone waves goodbye to the possibility of getting them back. Executives tell us creative ambition must complement commercial reality, which is rarely quite as comforting as the compliment initially makes it sound.

Consider this perfectly respectable sentence: The financier approved the filmmaker with reservations. Who had the reservations? Correct.

Then there are the redundancies we barely notice anymore: advance planning, future prospects, added bonus, end result. Our business can apparently charge twice for the same idea even at the level of vocabulary.

Do geese see God? I do not know. Good band though. We needed a rock resurgence, right? Do development executives see irony? Ambiguity? Satire? Perhaps, although irony may require meaningful attachment before it can proceed.

Our ecosystem does not need another task force, summit, or trio of senior strategic advisors specializing in the future of future strategy. Enough of the hullabaloo, mumbo-jumbo, strategic sputter, and institutional stutter. Sometimes the machine can whirr and buzz and hum so impressively that nobody notices the movie itself has gone poof.

And when the deal finally dies, someone will inevitably say the project has lost momentum.

Which is odd.

For years we were told it needed more traction.

Apparently we were financing a tire.

We can do more of the thing and less of the thing about the thing: make something, show something, learn something, and make the next thing. Build relationships before requiring transactions. Give audiences reasons to engage. Treat each work as part of a larger creative practice rather than a solitary scratch-off ticket upon which an entire career must depend.

Own what we can. License what we must. Keep learning, circulating, connecting, and compounding.

Our ecosystem needs more creation, connection, circulation, community, and compounding, and less permission, prediction, packaging, and postponement. That is our work too. We cannot keep blaming the old machinery while continuing to feed ourselves into it exactly as instructed.

The industry likes to tell filmmakers to keep a tight rein on costs while the old order continues to reign over access. We are urged to create discrete revenue streams while remaining remarkably discreet about who receives the revenue.

Again: one letter, quite a lot of economics.

Maybe what we need is a bold new initiative: F.I.L.M.: Fewer Intermediaries, Let’s Make. Okay, that acronym is terrible. We could hire a consultant, convene a committee, conduct stakeholder outreach, issue a white paper, and create a working group to workshop the wording. We either need a wedding or a weeding.

Or we could spare ourselves the flimflam in the film fam. Yes!

What we need is fewer funnels and more flow, less extraction and more exchange, less gatekeeping and more gathering. We need to spend less energy manufacturing the conditions under which somebody may someday allow a movie to happen, and more energy helping pictures actually happen.

And perhaps we should retain a little room for ridiculousness while doing it. Cinema needs play too. We are trying to build culture, not merely optimize content delivery through compliant corporate conduits.

So mock the machinery. Fiddle with the formula. Mangle a metaphor. Misplace a modifier. Rhyme without reason. Home in, hone in, or simply head in the general direction of something worth making.

Put a palindrome in a perfectly respectable paragraph:

Step on no pets. Particularly not while carrying a camera.