The Way We Finance & Budget Movies Limits Both Upside and Artistry

And it's not just that financial risk mitigation stymies creative experimentation

It is just a f’n mess.

It works like this…

To have any vibrant industry, you need both the innovators and the artisans.  You need the folks who are the wild thinkers, but also the tinkerers who can make something that might otherwise been basic, truly shine. We need the mad geniuses in the berets and the ones that keep their head down and execute the operational improvements. You can’t just rely on another Orson Welles to come around every generation; you need to have a systematic process to lift the good into the great and not allow the necessary infrastructure to whither and rust.

Now, granted, that is not what we have.

It’s like we got started for a nice hike but stopped to eat our sandwich and trail mix and then called it a day. We don’t support building either a better product or a better process. We make examples out of our exceptions — and never even pause to wonder why it is so hard to replicate their success. We are reliant on a system that was never remotely even designed, but instead built up impulsively over 50 years ago, and that now barely aligns with today’s practices, and when it does, there are a slew of missing gaps that limit us from adding or extracting the value, let alone making the impact that should be there waiting for us. Unfortunately, our foolishness does not stop there.

Amirite?

It follows that you also need to different funding mechanisms for these different approaches to making better movies. It’s also understandable that, as unfortunate as it may be, the corporate enterprises worship at the