Please actually facilitate a long term investment in your career, okay?
(and not just a one-off funding of your next project)
I think you can call this Part 3 of the Mo’ Better Biz Exploration (yeah, still working on the name game). If you missed parts 1 or 2 you might want to hit your pause button and dive into these first:
I want investors to invest in…. YOU. That actually means I want them to stop investing in an individual project of yours. Okay, I am not going to stop them if they do — and hell yeah, I want some to do that for me too — but I do want to improve the situation for film investment in this country and beyond, and I think this will help. I have written about previously why you need to abandon The One Film At A Time Mind Rot. I have also written about some methods to help investors make their money be more than just philanthropy (two parts!). And although very few industry professionals (other than me) like to admit, we’ve pretty much destroyed the once great environment for private equity investment in film. But the truth is we can build it better… and that involves generating a new business model.
The real question, like always, is why aren’t the ones with more of the power to do so, already doing so? The answer, like always, is the current system allows the powerful to continue to siphon off the ducats and maintain their position with little effort. If it is good enough for them themselves, why improve it for others?
That’s a sad way of being, so let’s not fall prey to it. We don’t need to wait for them, do we? We are building the better system now. Even you reading this now is doing that. We share our ideas and we take action. And right now that focus is how to get people to invest more frequently in the artists (who quite ofter are also entrepreneurs) and not exclusively into individual productions. So…
You always want to try to understand what the goals are of your financing partners from the start. And then try to align your goals with theirs in some way. And so…
Thinking primarily as an individual filmmaker, I think we see
