How do we deal with a post-lucrative filmmaking reality?

If everything is free and nobody makes money, what is an artist to do?

In our film “Monetized” a hassled, battle-weary filmmaker (Vivian Davidson) comedically turns the tables on her stay-at-home mom friend (Lauren Donnelly) by asking “What’s the point of having babies if you can’t make money off them?” Sure, it’s a joke, but it’s also that one thing nobody really wants to talk about. What if we artists actually CAN'T monetize our work anymore? What if there is just too much free product chasing too few disposable dollars? What if the success stories of the past - like making it big, selling that script, getting discovered by Hollywood, inking a huge distribution deal for our indie film - are just that, in the past?

It’s true that the filmmaking community is wonderfully supportive of its practitioners, and I’m sure we all do what we can to support our peers, renting their latest short off their VOD channel, kicking in a few bucks to their crowdfunding campaigns and so on. But in the end, it’s a pretty small community, and we are, in effect, just passing the same ten dollars back and forth, rather than creating new economic value. As we look around and see fewer and fewer mainstream people with full time jobs, or benefit plans, or even enough work hours to make ends meet, things don’t look great for filmmakers and other artists either.

It can become a cycle of defeat to keep expecting to make money directly from our art. We can feel like failures when we fail to earn money for our craft. That can leave us too discouraged to start new projects. And let’s face it: needing and not having money is the best excuse ever for not starting. So what to do? Well, we can sit around and wait for the good old days to come back, or we can make some positive changes that let us take our power back and stop putting too much economic pressure on ourselves. Here are some ideas for us, and I encourage you to contribute your own ideas to this list!

1. We can create art for the love of it, and for love of the audience, returning to our purest motivations for doing and creating artistic things. Remember that time when someone on set said your performance made them cry, or someone said your work inspired them? That will always be the best and highest calling for art. Our creative works have the ability to change lives, to make people think, to cheer and uplift others.
2. We can control the story and make it a great one. An amazing story is the lowest cost, highest return asset we can have. A well-written, engaging story will rise above many technical constraints, and allow the actors to really shine. If we are the best person to write the story, we should do so and invest the hours to make it outstanding. As the writer-filmmaker, we can also write with a view to avoiding unnecessary expenses.
3. We can drive all costs possible out of our projects. Be creative. Shoot with a smartphone if that’s what we have. Use free locations, or fewer locations. Use natural lighting, cut the number of characters and avoid crowd scenes. Work with amazing friends who will support us, knowing that we will support them back later. Build an ensemble over time that enjoys working together and try to create opportunities for them. Support them with IMDb credits, festival screenings, references, photographs and opportunities to do good work.  Work on their projects in any capacity we can.
4. We can remove the words “I’m working for nothing” from our language and thoughts. It comes with an implied thought pattern that suggests anything that comes without a cash payment is without worth. Yes, we all need cash to survive, but we can still see our services as an exchange of value that gets us as many good things as we can negotiate. Festival screening exposure, reviews, IMDb credits, photographs, a small honorarium, connections, references, social media shout-outs and help in-kind are all examples. After producing and directing 20+ short and micro short films, I can literally trace back every single success I have had to many instances where I worked for things other than cash, as I still often do. In the end, we all work for the audience, and we all like to work.
5. We can take the financial pressure off our art by finding other ways to make money. This can be an entirely different field of work we are trained or experienced in or it can be finding ways to spread the joy of our craft by teaching others how to do it for a fee, or by working in some other part of the business like being the person who helps out at auditions. As performers, we are already entrepreneurs, so we can think about broadening our offerings, finding ways to sell the things we know how to do. The more we decouple our need for money from our need to make art, the happier we will be.
   

I would love it if we could anticipate tons of funding for new projects, but assuming that may not happen, we can still be very supportive of each other. A “like” or a share goes a long way in helping out a colleague. Pitching in to help out with a project can make the difference in its success. By using some of the ideas above, we can be making films for less money that still please audiences, which is the name of the game!

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