Fundraising the Honest Way

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.

If you’re making a film you want the biggest budget possible. (“I can’t live without at least one crane shot. I get depressed otherwise. Now get me a latte, tall, with crispy foam.”)

So one morning you wake up, make your own damn latte and start plugging in numbers into a spreadsheet (or an abacus if you’re low budget) and you end up with a budget for a $15 million indie movie. Then you realize you don’t know enough rich dentists to finance that, so you cut the budget so a rich used-car salesman might be able to finance it. Then you realize that the car industry has tanked and your lean budget isn’t roadworthy. Your suspicions are proven right when you pitch the five mil picture to some used-car salesmen and they start asking you for money. The meeting is getting embarrassing, so you excuse yourself and go cut your budget again.

This time maybe you get the film in at $1.2 million. The latte line item has been slashed, along with the fake blood and alas, there are no cranes. You take this budget to a potential investor and make your presentation.

He says, “If I invest in your film, how will I get back my money?”

Since you don’t know the answer, you go with distraction. “Hey, isn’t that pigeon over there wearing a superman outfit?” You’re desperate to buy time, so you say, “You’ll get your money back in six months!” That sounds  good. But it wouldn’t be true. “What I meant to say is you’ll get your money back in three months!” That sounds even better and of course it’s a bigger lie.

Then you come up with the perfect thing to say: “Keep your money in your pocket because the film market has tanked and I have no idea how I’ll pay your money back.”

Your potential investor starts looking a little crabby. You say,”We’ll borrow the money from a bank, if we could find a bank that would loan us money. Maybe if we sever a limb and hand it to the bank officer on a bed of lettuce and promise indentured service. I will also throw in one of my children as collateral.”

The meeting is getting awkward. The investor corrects you. “Banks are not taking children as collateral anymore. New regulations.”

Will banks take pets as collateral? Yes, but only if they were once owned by celebrities.

You can’t go there. Then you realize something. You have a responsibility to make a film that fits the market. This concept was addressed in an All Cities networking meeting I attended and it came up again this morning at a meeting with a smart producer’s rep.

The imparted wisdom is this: Look at the market. Study the films that are like yours. Find out how they were budgeted and how much money they took in. (IMDb and Box Office Mojo work well for this and you can also check out PBS’s Current.org Pipeline listing.) You can see what your film might actually make. You can decide if you’re willing to make it on a budget that could actually return investors’ money. Huh. I believe the term for that is honesty.

Here are some of the films I’m looking at in my own research.

(500) Days of Summer. Domestic Gross: $32,391,374

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? Domestic Gross: $10,941,801

Run Lola Run. Domestic Gross: $7,267,585

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How Many Lives Are You Leading Today?

500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

We are living the beta of our lives, the untested, slightly buggy, first draft version. Or not. We might be living the perfect version of our lives, getting everything right, even though we might not know this until some time in the future. There’s an expression, “If my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather,” usually rendered in Yiddish and followed by a scornful bark of a laugh. You can’t grasp what might have been. Or can you?

Dr. J. Richard Gott is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton who likes to ask questions about time such as, “What if you could time-travel into the past?”

Say you did that and killed your grandmother and therefore were never born. Dr. Gott believes you would cause the universe “to branch off into a parallel universe with a time traveler and a dead grandmother.” Of course, there would also be a universe where your grandmother lived and you were born.

To use Dr. Gott’s analogy, it’s like a railway switching yard with lots of trains running on parallel tracks. This concept is called the Multiverse.

It’s the kind of concept that makes me want to gently close the door and listen to Bach until the concept goes away. But it’s not going to go away.

Not only are filmmakers exploring it in movies like “Sliding Doors” and “Run Lola Run” but scientists are exploring life as a set of coexisting pathways. A multiverse instead of a universe. Could be there’s a world where World War II never happened. A world where Tom Cruise admits he’s gay. A world where Madonna is a good singer.

Quantum theory has come up with some strange stuff: Protons and electrons act like both waves and particles. They can be teleported from one place to another without passing through space. A single particle seems capable of appearing in many places simultaneously.

Physicist David Deutsch says that “everyone agrees” that quantum theory is “outlandish.” That might be why many physicists only want to discuss quantum theory in reference to photons and electrons. But Deutsch takes a bigger risk, insisting that quantum theory must apply to something larger than subatomic particles – he says to be valid it has to apply to people. When you do that it generates some unsettling outcomes.

All possible variations of us must exist. Every possible option we’ve ever encountered is being acted out in some universe by at least one of our other selves.

Just when I thought life couldn’t become messier, with its moodiness and alternate side of the street parking regulations, now I have to consider that there could be other versions of us leading their own messy lives. What to make of that?

“Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward,” said Kierkegaard. He may have been gloomy but he was right. We’re all time travelers into the future. But it’s good to know there’s a parallel life train running somewhere, an on-time train that could be getting everything right. Does anybody know how to transfer at the next station?