Q. Have you ever tried crowdfunding?

A. No, I haven't.

Periodically I get emails from people who are crowdfunding their movie and want me to post about it. And I know Jane Espenson has been raising money for her web series via Kickstarter.

I haven't tried for a number of reasons. One, I don't like producing. I have produced or helped produce some of my shorts, but I much preferred the experience on YOU ARE SO UNDEAD, where I didn't have to worry my pretty little head about any of the details of the money. I'm the producer on the feature I want to direct, ALICE FOUND ALIVE, because the funding stream I'm trying to access requires that the director own the copyright; and because you don't make any real money producing a million dollar feature up here.

(My producer friend Avi told a crowd of us at the CFC Short Film Festival that he produces million dollar features as a passion; and he works as a line producer in order to cover the money he doesn't make as a producer. Since then he's gone into distributing; vertical integration should give him more of an upside.)

Two, I don't see that anyone's put together a serious amount of money via crowdfunding. Jane Espenson raised, I think, her goal of $60,000 through Kickstarter. A couple of observations.

One, Jane is a showrunner. A lot of people want to get on her good side. I bet she has a $250,000 crew working for free.

Two, Jane has a huge fan base thanks to her Buffy and Battlestar credits. I don't see anyone raising more than Jane, except Joss Himself.

Three, Jane can make $60,000 writing a free lance TV script, which probably takes her a week. I think Jane is doing it because it's interesting and experimental and fun. When Joss wanted to make Dr. Horrible, he just wrote a bunch of checks. Faster that way.

Four, I don't need $60,000 to make my film. I need a million bucks. That's just my appetite. I don't know anybody who knows how to produce a film for a hundred grand that looks and sounds good enough to get distribution.

(Ask Bill Cunningham. He knows.)

Everyone has an appetite. Michael Bay probably doesn't know how to make a film for under a hundred million, at least not one that he'd be willing to spend two years on.

I think there are going to be people who put together a brilliant viral campaign to crowdfund a film that they make for $100,000. But they are going to need luck. And they are going to have to do a tremendous amount of work to get their project out there; and for every successful crowdfunded movie there are going to be forty five that don't get their funding.

I'm fortunate to live in Quebec, where there is huge government support for the arts. So it makes more sense for me to government fund my stuff.

On the other hand, we'll see what happens when the agencies come back with their answers. If there's a substantial hole in the financing, I may come back to y'all with my hand out...

UPDATE: These guys are funding their $150,000 P&A through crowdfunding.

Kickstarter, the guide

Here's an interesting how-to for funding a movie through Kickstarter... by the guys who are trying to fund a movie called Fal$e Profit. And here's their Kickstarter - they're trying to raise $50K. And here's Jane Espenson trying to raise $50,000 for Season Two of Husbands.

Short Film Financing Seminar in St. Laurent, Quebec

Financing Your Short Film!

Yes, it’s possible to finance short films in Canada, and this panel of experts will give insights and advice on just how to do it. Of course, it’s not easy, but if auteur filmmaking is the passion that drives you then this is a presentation you’re not going to want to miss! Our experts include the hugely successful animation short filmmaker Malcolm Sutherland (Bird Calls, Forming Game, Astronomer’s Dream), Tim Dallett from the pan-Canadian Independent Media Arts Alliance (umbrella group for Canadian media arts centres and co-ops), and funders Judy Gladstone (CTVglobemedia’s Bravo!FACT) and Felipe Diaz, program officer from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Financing Your Short Film! panel
Wednesday, June 30, 1pm to 2:30pm


Please join us with your questions, concerns and curiosity and take the chance to speak directly to those who’ve done it, are doing it and who make those decisions so crucial to your creative livelihood. Hosted by NFB animation producer Michael Fukushima.

If you’re able, please stay afterwards for some light refreshments and for the launch screening of our brand-new batch of Hothouse films, Hothouse 6: Inside Out, screened in glorious stereoscopic 3D!

Hothouse 6: Inside Out screening
Wednesday, June 30, 3pm to 3:30pm

National Film Board of Canada
Pierre-Perrault Theatre
3155 chemin cote-de-Liesse
St-Laurent, Quebec (H4N 2N4)

Looking Good in Shorts

If you are a young or youngish Quebec-based screenwriter, whether you write in English or French, check out SODEC's "Cours Après Ton Court" aka "Sprint for Your Script." It's a program for writers 18-35 who are "pursuing a professional writing career," that is, no currently enrolled students. There's mentorship, and nifty prizes. Deadline is August 9. Check it out at the official SODEC site.

Kickstart

Some folks are trying to start up a Canadian SF magazine called AE. Helen Michaud wrote me:

I'm starting a science fiction magazine with some friends that will be focused on Canadian writers. We're committed to paying SFWA professional rates to all our contributors and publishing a minimum of 75% Canadian content between our covers. We hope to put out our first issue in Fall of this year.

As an additional incentive, we're running a microfiction contest: science fiction stories inspired by the word "micro" in no more than 200 words.

This is not actually a call for submissions, it's a Kickstarter call for subscriptions. Kickstarter is a site where people who want to help a creative project pledge money towards getting it made. If enough gets pledged, the project gets made.

This is how expensive books used to get made. Audubon sold copies of his BOOKS OF AMERICA before he'd printed it. He went around showing people the art and taking their money. Took him years. When he had enough, they got their gorgeous folio editions of the book. (They are now worth several hundred thousand dollars apiece.)

Theoretically, a subscription model could get, say, a Joss Whedon show off the ground. Joss posts a TV bible, and all those folks on Whedonesque put up what they'd pay for the first season DVD, and in exchange, Joss makes the series.

The economics probably don't work out. A TV show needs millions of viewers, not tens of thousands of hardcore fans. And how many people are hardcore enough to pledge fifty bucks for a show that hasn't even been made? To make Season 2 of FIREFLY you'd probably need, oh, fifty million bucks. Can even Joss sell a million subscriptions?

But they only need ten thousand bucks for their SF magazine. If you're up for it, help them kickstart it.

Features Panel in Montreal

I went to a panel on Feature Writing in Montreal, organized by the irrepressible Anne-Marie Perrotta, and got to hear Mark Krupa (THE WILD HUNT), Doug Taylor (SPLICE), Steve Galluccio (FUNKYTOWN) and Jacob Tierney (THE TROTSKY) talk about their experiences writing in my fair city. We're in a peculiar situation here because, as English screenwriters, we are writing in a minority language.

It is extremely hard to make a living in English TV in Montreal; of the two shows that are shooting here, one has a primarily Toronto staff. But it is quite possible to write features here. It was fun to hear the four writers talk about their unique experiences. Mark wrote a feature that got made for almost no money and won the Audience Award at Slamdance. Jacob directed his film (his second of three now), starring Jay Baruchel, who is about to hit the big time with OUT OF MY LEAGUE. Doug writes movies that get produced all over the place -- London, Vancouver, LA. And Steve's movie is bilingual, and could only have been made here.

It was interesting to hear that there is actually more money in Montreal for certain kinds of movies. Québec takes culture seriously, even Anglo culture, and you can get more money from SODEC, the provincial funding agency, than you can from Telefilm, the federal funding agency. Other provincial agencies, like Ontario's OMDC, aren't doing so well.

Why Montreal? "Montreal feeds you," said Steve, "the way New York feeds you." I couldn't agree more. Doug's feeling is he's writing all over the world, so why not live where he wants to live? Mark and Jacob are both die-hard Montrealers, too. Mark's movie was only possible with the dedicated participation of the hundreds of medieval re-enactors of Bicolline. Jacob made the point that when he was in Toronto, he kept having to write for Montreal and transfer it to Toronto, so he decided, why not write and direct the movies in the place they're really set?

The writers all talked about notes -- particularly funding agency notes. Arts bureaucrats need to give notes -- it's their job. The danger is that too many notes can kill a script. The writer's job "becomes more about protecting it than changing it," said Jacob, who also confided that he's tempted to leave a few glitches in his scripts in order to "focus the criticism." -- why not give them something you know is wrong that you can easily remove?

THE WILD HUNT opens in Montreal on April 9th. THE TROTSKY opens across Canada May 14. SPLICE opens June 4. FUNKYTOWN opens December 17.

Toot, Toot

Come shoot your show here.

MONTREAL -- Quebec now offers film producers one of the best tax incentives in North America. All production costs, not just labor expenses, are now eligible for a 25% tax credit.

"I think it's extraordinary. It's really big. The phones have started to ring," says Michel Trudel, who co-owns the equipment rental company Locations Michel Trudel with Mel Hoppenheim of Quebec's La Cité du Cineacute;ma studio. "This is what we needed to get the Americans to come again."

The provincial government said Friday it's increasing the tax credit for foreign filming from 25% of labor expenses to 25% of all spending.

Or, you know, come shoot my show here. Just sayin.

This Seems Like a Crazy Idea

People keep trying to come up with new ways to finance movies. Beneflix proposes to fund movies through donations, like a charity:

1. Filmmakers upload a movie scene.
2. Filmmakers provide several ideas for the movie's next scene or invite users to suggest ideas of their own.
3. The Beneflix User Base votes on scene ideas using cNotes (purchased for .25 cents each)
4. The winning scene is made.

This is nuts for so many reasons. First of all, it's completely uneconomical to shoot scenes one at a time. Second, you can't tell a good story by having the audience vote.

But hey, whatever works!

Budget from Outline?

Q. I have the ability to direct movies without scripts but just outlines. I can schedule and budget on the basis of an outline and then complete the production. So far all of my productions have followed the same pattern. Is it impossible to find investors for such kind of film-maker even on low-budgets in the US?

Yep.

Okay, let me clarify that a bit. I am not sure Henry Jaglom has scripts. He seems to shoot a great deal of improv and then edit. And there are other directors who have shot pictures that way; a lot of experiments were done in the '60's and '70's.

And, of course, "reality" tv shows have outlines, but no scripts.

So if your selling point is that you like to let the actors improvise, you may be able to get away with it. But it's a hard sell. Buyers can't see what movie you're planning to make. There's no way to tell if the comedy is funny, if the romance is suave, etc. They have to trust that you can direct the hell out of your outline.

What you would need to finance an outline would be at least one and hopefully several brilliant finished movies made the same way, without a script. And you would probably have to show that these movies have made money for their investors.

Unfortunately, now is just about the worst imaginable time to try to get new investors. The credit crunch has dried up all the loose money. I'm not sure investors are in the mood for experiments right now. I'm not sure audiences are, either.

You Know You're Not Going Out Tonight...

I had an interesting chat with a friend of mine about the state of showbiz in the recession. All around, I'm hearing anxiety and fear due to the economy tanking. Networks have been firing employees and blaming the downturn, though as DMc remarked yesterday, they likely would have made those cuts without a recession to blame. Certainly Corus didn't need a downturn to fire dozens of employees last year, including beloved veteran network execs like Shelley Gillen.

What I hadn't heard till yesterday was a convincing explanation of why the downturn had to affect my own neck of the woods. Canadian broadcasters already make the absolute bare regulatory minimum of homebrew drama, preferring to air American shows they buy for more money than home-made shows cost to make. They could make less by petitioning the CRTC to allow them to air fewer hours of original drama. But I'm not sure how well that conversation would go. They would be asking a Canadian government agency to allow them to ship jobs and money out of the country. That doesn't sound like a winning argument.

The convincing reason to panic is simply the credit crunch. Producing movies is the same business as producing clothes. (One reason why so many of the great names of the early days in Hollywood started in the rag trade.) Unless you're a studio, you don't start with the money to make a movie. You start with a script, a director, and a cast. You sell your package of bankable elements to distributors in the various territories. (I'm making these numbers up; I haven't been in foreign sales for a decade.) The contract with the British distrib gives you a "minimum guarantee" (m.g.) of X number of dollars. Say Great Britain comes in for 15%, and Germany for 20%, and Japan for 15%. Say you wind up with 70% of your budget presold. Often a foreign film won't be able to presell the US market for any kind of reasonable price. How do you make your movie?

You take those contracts to a bank. They "discount" your contracts (as they would in the rag trade), and give you cash for your contracts (taking a small fee). That leaves you with a 30%+ "gap."

Now you need "gap financing" to "bridge the gap." Gap financing costs more than discounting, because it's riskier. What if the movie stinks? The presold territories have to pay anyway -- their contracts don't promise a good movie, only a movie based on the script, starring the stars, and directed by the director. But you'll have trouble selling the unsold territories. So the bank is going to want to see territories worth, say, twice as much as the bridge money it's fronting.

In years when credit is loose, banks love gap financing. They charge a lot for it. Charging for financing is their business. But now that credit is tight, banks are wary of gap financing. They might only gap 10%, and they might demand, say, three times the gap in territories. They'll make less money, but they won't get left holding the bag.

You don't have to go to a bank for gap financing. You can find your own money from investors. They might take, say, a 30% piece of the movie's gross revenues in return for bringing 30% of the budget. If the movie's a hit, they'll do better than the bank. The bank gets paid the same fees whether the movie is a hit or not. Investors get a share.

But when credit is tight, there are fewer investors around, and they're more demanding. If they do put money in your movie, they might want, say, 45% of the revenues for their 30% contribution.

One reason Canada has a film industry is that government subsidies and regulatory protection help bridge the gap. If you shoot your movie in Quebec, you wind up with federal and Quebec subsidies amounting to 25% of your budget. Canadian distributors and broadcasters have to buy a certain amount of Canadian films, so they'll contribute another 9%. That 31% can solve a producer's gap problem right there.

TV is financed along similar lines. The Canadian broadcaster provides a much, much bigger chunk of the puzzle. Instead of 9%, you could be seeing anywhere from 30-45% from broadcasters, which could be topped up by the CTF envelope to a max of 25% of budget; so potentially 70% of budget. (Even more if they take an equity position, as CTV did with CORNER GAS.) So financing Canadian TV, if you have a broadcaster, is much easier than financing Canadian features. But you still have to find that remaining 30%+. That usually means a foreign sale, unless you can wangle a US broadcaster on board up front. If you can get a US broadcast partner up front, of course, you're laughing. Even if you get a lousy license fee, you're now selling a "US" series overseas, and you'll get more for it.

I've been fortunate in that all three of the series I've staffed had US sales. GALIDOR and NAKED JOSH were sold up front to FoxKids and Oxygen; CHARLIE JADE sold to Sci Fi after we made it.

So the Canadian TV market shouldn't be in as much danger.

But here's a bigger reason I'm not panicking.

Movies and TV are two of the best industries to be in during a recession. Why? Because movies and TV are cheap entertainment. Compare a night at the movies to a night out to dinner. $12 a ticket versus $30-60 a person? How about nightclubs? Let's not even think about ticket prices for rock concerts or theater.

TV, of course, is even cheaper. For about $60-80 a month, you can get cable or satellite with premium movie channels, and no babysitter to pay. I told my exec at The Movie Network that they ought to be taking out full page ads in the papers, saying "You know you're not going out tonight. What's on TV?"

That's the economics of entertainment. But there's also the appetite. In a downturn, people desperately need to take their minds off their problems. The movies boomed during the Great Depression. The Warner brothers were in the red in 1929, but cleverly invested more and more money in their movies. They did better in 1930, and even better in 1931 and 1932. The lousier the economy was, the more people wanted to see Cary Grant playing a millionaire or Fred Astaire dancing in a top hat.

And reruns won't cut it. People will fix their old car instead of buying a new one. But no one wants to see last year's AMERICAN IDOL, and there's a limit to how many times you can watch HELLBOY 2 before you really won't be satisfied with anything less than HELLBOY 3.

So I'm not extra worried about finding work this year. And maybe you shouldn't be, either.

(I think. God willing.)

(There's a huge irony. When I was in school, the safe jobs were in banking, insurance and real estate. Who knew that showbiz was a more reliable choice? And nobody's outsourcing screenwriting to Mumbai.)

There will be changes in the type of entertainment that gets greenlit. I am told that Harvey Weinstein recently stood up in a crowd of producers and said, "We're not looking for artistic integrity any more. We're looking for commercial integrity."

In other words, Harvey, of all people, is looking for popcorn movies. Your MEAN STREETS style idea might not be the way to go these days. Think about your AMELIE or WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING or OCEANS 21.

The credit crunch will initially hurt movies and, to a lesser extent, TV. But in the medium run, people's appetite for filmed entertainment will, if anything, strengthen. And that appetite will pull in whatever money there is.

UPDATE: Looks like I'll be talking more about this on various CBC Radio stations tomorrow morning. I'll post times as soon as I know them.

$5 an episode?

Apple is in an argument with NBC, which wants to charge $5 an episode to download its shows. Apple wants to sell all TV episodes for the same price on iTunes.

I think charging a sawbuck is a bit much. Personally I think they will have trouble selling episodes for that much. I got a season pass for MAD MEN for a little over a buck an episode; individual episodes are two bucks. That seems about right.

But I think it's good that NBC is fooling around with its pricing model.

It's clear to most people who worry about such things that the broadcast model is deteriorating with the advent of TiVo and DVDs. If the nets can't count on ad revenu, then they have to move either to a subscription model like HBO, or to some kind of per-episode payment model, or severe product placement, or something new people haven't thought of yet. Figuring out what the market will bear for premium broadcast shows (HEROES) is part of the process of inventing the new business model.

Fve bucks an episode is, for example, more or less what you pay for an HBO show, if that's the only series you're watching on HBO.

Another thing I like about the idea of variable pricing is, it raises the value of well-made shows. I am not sure that you could sell episodes of THE AMAZING RACE for as much as you could sell LOST or GRAY'S ANATOMY. ROME got me to sign up for TMN (our HBO). And if I had to pay per episode for FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, I would.

Per-episode pricing changes the medium. You won't have to worry about act outs, because once someone pays money for a show, they're likely to watch the whole thing; and if they don't, who cares? On the other hand it promotes serial shows: you want your audience shelling out for that season pass. A series like LAW & ORDER doesn't give you the strongest possible reason to watch the next episode over some other episode. LOST does.

A variable pricing model could also create economic efficiencies. You could sell a HEROES episode for $5 on the week it's released, then $3.50 the following week, and so on, till you get down to the Buck-a-Flix Cinema price. That gives the viewer options, and scoops up more money for the distributor. Why should I pay the same price for old LOST IN SPACE reruns and the next hour of MAD MEN? It's illogical, Captain.

So while I can understand Apple's point -- they want their pricing model simple, because Apple is all about simple. But NBC has an excellent point. I hope they get to try their experiment. We gotta figure out some way to pay for all these tv shows.

UPDATE: Tim W. makes the excellent point that people not only have the option not to buy an episode, or wait for the DVD, but also to download it illegally. So the online price really has to seem fair and reasonable. I'm happy to pay $25 for a season pass to MAD MEN -- and I did -- because I don't want to steal episodes via Bittorrent. But at $5 a pop, I might feel outraged enough to consider going through the hassle of pirating via torrentz.

International Film Distribution

Q. I am currently editing a 80 minute movie that I've shot. I want enter New Directors/New Films 2008 and am hoping to get critic review to get recognition and land an agent/manager.

The movie is in Hindi so subtitling is needed. My plan is to make it to as many film festivals as possible and get reviews there. I've shot it on DV. How do I move ahead from here?

Sounds like you're on the right track. Get your film subtitled, which ought to be no problem on DV. Submit it to festivals, particularly those that show a lot of international films. It ought to be pretty easy to find lists of film festivals on the Net -- maybe a reader here will send us a link. Check out last year's films at that festival. If there's something from Israel and something from China and something from Afghanistan, you've got the right festival for a film in Hindi.If your film is a comedy, check out comedy film festivals. If your film is about kids, check out San Sebastiane. Etc.

New Directors / New Films is not bad because it shows films from "Hungary to Haiti, China to Angola, Mexico to Morocco, Italy to Japan." But it also shows only 22 films or so. You want to hit festivals that show 220 films.

Ganesha willing, you get accepted at some festivals and get some good write-ups or even win awards. Then you can approach international distributors -- again, check out films like yours and see who distributed them.

And you're off to the races. Good luck!