HFF's The5: 03.15.25 Edition

Passion, money, fear

If you are reading this now, you are most likely a subscriber. It also means you probably get this as an email and into you inbox. I get it. Super convenient. But did you know that if you open this on your desk top or lap top, HopeForFilm improves?

Yup. It’s true. Why? The layout is better on the website. There is a handy dandy navigation bar. Substack is far more on a desktop than the endless scroll you find on your phone. If you' haven’t viewed it there, you should.

Give it a whirl sometime, won’t you?

HFF’sThe5: Ides Of March edition

5 A new ratings champ

4 You can’t shut the place down; we will sprout like weeds.

3 Let’s buy them all!

2 There’s no denying it is a winning formula

1 Go for broke is the only way to win.

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Why Are All The Oscar Filmmakers Broke?

I got tipped to this from Ted Gioia’s recent Substack column. I’m super pleased to have Luc Forsyth highlight how tough it is out there for filmmakers. Although he weights it more towards the need for passion, dedication, commitment, and devotion to make an artful film like ANORA or THE BRUTALIST, he does touch upon the relentless unpaid slog that is needed to promote a film today. To me it is the systemic and structural abuses that infect our industry (see the 220 things I listed last year).

We COULD compensate artists and entrepreneurs for their ambitiously authored work, and no one at any of the corporate cinema entities are trying to do something about it.

Luc uses one of my favorite phrases, but for a different meaning. He makes a distinction between being a filmmaker and a filmworker. I use the filmworker term in my bio and elsewhere because I don’t see my career as making movies, although that is predominately what I do. I try to address the system with everything that I do — like write this newsletter. Although with each new film I support, I am trying to help it become the best version of the director’s intent, I am not in it for the individual film. I am thinking about all the films and how we see them.

We don’t have to accept how we get paid for our work, even when we don’t have a choice. We can always be working to leave things better than we found it. Things will change.

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