Breaking Down Final Costs on a Feature

I've been asked to share more about what I do as an indie producer. Well, today I'm heading over to my business partner's home to break down the final costs on our feature Not Since You. 

We were able to finance Not Since You with a mix of cash and in-kind investments as well as partial crew deferrals. And now that we have a screener for buyers and a week before we receive them from the disc vendor, Jade and I are going to spend the day crunching the numbers of how much and when we owe everyone money. Of course, we anticipate a sale (important to remain positive always) so we want to be ready with a plan of where the sales proceeds will be going.

This is not going to be a fun or easy process. Yay! We have our cash investments from a number of investors, in-kind investments, crew deferrals, anticipated music licensing, legal, and sales fees, and estimates for keeping the business running each year as well as SAG residuals. 

To date, we have kept very accurate records of investments, deferrals, and costs. We tracked every expense in Quickbooks from day one. Each month, Jade balances the Quickbooks file with any costs. If we had to do it all over again, it would take weeks to recreate. 

Our goal is to do a cheat sheet of what we owe in each category. In essence, we will be finalizing our accounts payable, which should amount to over a hundred people owed (this is when crew deferrals get tedious to deal with). 

I like to have information at my fingertips that gives me the overall outlook of the project. I am all about the big picture. So now we have the incredible task of melding this information into a master document. And that's what we will be doing today and probably a couple more days too. As we go to buyers, I want to know exactly where every penny needs to go and when we will go into profit!

Producers Are Financiers

I don't think there is enough discussion about producers being financiers. Many look at a producer as the leader of the production and integrally involved in the creation of the film, but they don't necessarily look at him or her as the money person. However, one of the largest producing tasks is finding money.

I love movies. I am driven by their ability to change people's perspectives on life. I would love to ignore the money-finding stage and just focus on the fun, creative stuff of making a movie. However, I can't ignore the fact that my main job is finding money. I don't even have to manage the production. I can hire a line producer to do that for me. So really, my main job is being the sugar momma.

I was drawn to producing by the creative desire to help make entertaining films that resonate with an audience. I wanted to make art. I quickly realized though that along with the creative comes the fiscal responsibility of ensuring the budget will be there for the film. This has not been an easy aspect for me. I had trouble selling Girl Scout cookies as a kid. How was I going to sell movies to investors?

With passion, comes confidence. I have such a passion for making films that I am propelled to leave my comfort zone each day and make those phone calls, draft those emails and reach out to others who have money and sell my films. I have come to embrace the fact that I am the money-bags behind the project -- even if I don't find every cent; I know I have to manage it. 

So if you are thinking producing is the career for you, you need to wrap your head around the idea that you need to feel comfortable finding and managing money. You will need to reach out to wealthy people and pitch your work to financiers, production companies and studios. If you don't see yourself finding and managing money, you may want to consider another aspect of filmmaking as producers really are financiers.

New Yorker Closes Doors. Let's Keep Ours Open!

The indie world is in a tizzy right now over the closing of longstanding indie distributor New Yorker. It's a sad day when a company like New Yorker shuts its doors. To think that they made it through decades (43 years to be exact) of perilous times only to meet its demise in a time when society needs access to auteur filmmaking more than ever. IndieWire has a great article here on the whole gut-wrenching story. 

Talk about rubbing salt in all our wounds after we dig ourselves in this hole by foolishly overextending on home loans and allowing Wall Street to play Monopoly with our money. A side effect of all of this play time is the loss of the treasures like New Yorker. I can only hope we all have learned from our mistakes. I'm certainly learning as I struggle to stay alive myself! 

The days of knowingly overextending ourselves in the hopes that we will figure it out in the future are gone. This is true for us in the indie film world. We can't greenlight films in the hopes that we will make our money back. We need to "know" as much as we possibly can that we can make the money back or we will all end up with our doors closed. 

How do we do that? Research and work. We can't "guess" that our audience will like the film and want to see it. We need to find out before we even make the film who our audience is and will they want to see this film. We need to cast the film with our audience's interests in mind. We need to create a budget and cut it in half. We need to market our stories as soon as we have them. Basically, we need to do everything we can at the earliest stage possible to ensure our doors stay open!