"There's still Hope!"
My recent conversation at the Miami Media and Film Market
You may be aware that Vanessa and I have been on a nationwide college tour screening our documentary INVISIBLE NATION to twenty or so universities. It happened to align with the Miami Film Festival so I stopped in and had a chat with some of the attendees. They were in turn kind enough to record it for all of you.
I must confess I like listening to these public conversations I get to have at festivals. It helps me distill what I am actually saying. What is this moment we are experiencing? What is my “message”? Listening to my recent talk at the MMFM, I think it comes down to this:
“Independent” cinema can survive and thrive if filmmakers stop depending on broken systems and start building authentic relationships with audiences and communities.
So that’s our mandate. Let’s stop reading and get work!
Or maybe you want to sip your coffee and dwell on it for a bit. I’m with you on that one.
To get to something like that I think we have to both look back and look for forward simultaneously. Fortunately for you, I had an excellent guide in this discussion. Jose Luis “JL” Martinez hit the high points, both backwards and forwards. The conversation is something for both artists and cinemakers, as well as for the industry on the business side too.
Yes, we cover my career and philosophy. We delve into the birth of 90’s American “indie” and we go deep into core aspects of the work today, from constraints to collaboration, audience and community building. Of course we discuss NonDē — when you coin a term, you always have that to talk about, right?
I think my two fave subjects these days on our industry’s structural failures and the inevitable disruption of the disintermediation of distribution. And we get to those too. Don’t worry, I don’t see either is all that negative — we just have work to do.
On the creative side, we explored the benefits of personal specificity over mainstream thinking, and the tremendous value to be found in human imperfection. Both of those being aspects of the need to restore joy to the creative process. Bring on the joy more please!
We covered a lot of ground. I wish you could have been there. I really enjoyed the Q&A too and hope that JL releases that too — but for now we’ve got an hour of listening for you, perhaps far less if you give it a speed read below! But please give the video a play and maybe even some hearts on the Youtube side of things. Maybe it can lead to some future bookings, right?
Miami Media & Film Market Mastershot 2026: “There’s still hope for film!: A conversation with Ted Hope”
A friend kindly created this transcript; I’ve done a little light editing for clarity and brevity.
Jose Luis, “JL” Martinez: Ted just, let’s start at the beginning. Let’s have a chat. Tell us a little bit about yourself for folks that don’t know who you are and what you mean to the world of independent cinema and films in general.
Ted Hope: That’s right: pat myself on the back. Yes. I’ve been in the business about 40 years.
I’ve produced over 70 films.
— Feedback noise interrupts —
Oh, if the noise in my head starts bothering you, let me know. Okay?
JL: That (noise) was intentional.
Ted: I was an executive on close to that same number (of films). I’ve started several production companies, post-production company, sales company. Streaming services. I ran movies for Amazon, launched their film program in 2014, and I write obsessively on Substack, a newsletter called Hope for Film and, yeah, I, if we come up with a good name, I’ll give you guys all a 50% discount off of a year’s subscription if you want it. But someone has gotta hand me the special code that I’ll call the discount and I’ll send it to you afterwards. Yes. We’ll, if you want, we’ll run it through if you want a 50% discount.
I’ve long been a blogger, but I think that what I do on the newsletter — or some people have said is — I speak loudly what other people only whisper. So I’ve been helping to try to articulate what a alternative to the depressing times are about cinema and how do we restore Hope for film and that has come to be a movement that I got to name “NonDē” (to the chagrin of some people), but that’s “non-dependent”. But it has a long “e” over the E, so it’s very difficult to type. Because all good things should be something you have to work a little bit for. That little bit of annoyance is how the pearl gets made in the oyster. So that’s what that Ē symbolizes. And I just thought it was cool.
It’s exceeded my dreams ‘cause there’s a lot of stuff that is happening where people have recognized that we’re in a major hinge moment — a moment of change — and perhaps the existing ecosystem and what we called “Independent film” never was independent, but highly dependent and actually highly restrictive.
For about 15 years now, people have been speaking up and saying it only makes sense to budget for your own distribution and marketing, but really no one does it. And I know how hard it is for me to do that too, but my wife and I have been leading the distribution of her film for the last two and a half years, and this is a movie that people said could never make money and never would get seen, and we’ve done about a two and a half X multiple on the equity, and next month it airs on public television, which will have a 90% carriage. So that’s about a hundred million households. And so for a movie that is about impact, I think it’s a pretty damn successful method and I’ve been sharing the learnings ‘cause I’ve learned a lot, 40 years I’m still learning and I’ve learned a lot of how there is a different approach (from the industry standard).
You’re going to have to interrupt me ‘cause I just keep going on and out.
JL: I’m learning… I like it.
Ted: One of those key learnings that really, like there were a couple things as I entered the streaming world that kind of changed how I thought about things and is an interesting way to say about what makes this moment different and why can we have hope for film?
Not in the newsletter (that is), but the overall. And when I got to run a startup streaming platform called Fandor — it still exists.
JL: Sure.
Ted: And it was in like 2013 in San Francisco. It was the height of that startup culture. And we had about 42 employees and 25% of them had been involved in successful startups.
So we had 25% of our workforce that were millionaires. Wow. And they were just there to see “would this next thing work?” So they had no hesitation coming up to me —the CEO — and giving me… I think the polite word is…. “shit”. “Ted, do you know what you’re doing?”
And I’d be like, “yeah, I’m running this movie streaming platform.”
“No, you’re not. You are running an audience aggregation platform. You know how to build audiences, don’t you?”
And I was like “make something good?”.
And they were like “No. You build audiences by having a regular cadence of supply at a consistent quality level in an environment that people trust and wanna participate in.”
I got that tattooed on my back. Because you have to think about that. That’s really true about so many different things: that regular cadence of supply at a consistent quality in an environment that people trust and wanna participate in.
That kind of changed my outlook on so many different things that I do.
I’ve always been a collaborator. My companies have always been co-ops or partnerships. Partially as I realize now, because how else are you gonna do that regular cadence, right?
That’s really “what is a regular cadence?” You expect it’s “coming soon” somehow, right? Not once every three years. Not even once a year, but soon.
So trying to figure that out has led to a lot of the decisions that I’ve made. And then it was something else that was like… I was gonna say something else, and then I remember that one. The other big change. Where was I?
JL: we were talking about your brief bio?
Ted: Yeah. And I got distracted.
We’ll come back to that. Hold that thought, that’s Step One.
JL: But I wanted to take a step back even further and just ‘cause obviously, I always think that, what happens in the past always reverberates in the future. So when you first started making independent films, let’s say it was when you co-founded Good Machine in the late eighties, early nineties… what inspired you then to keep going and to keep doing this thing and what mindset existed at the time for independent film?
Ted: I think I have to take it back two steps from there. Okay?
I’d fallen in love with movies and I was ashamed of it. And I think that was really helpful. Like my life got changed. I grew up in a working class environment. It was a troubled place and I got a scholarship to a private high school and all of a sudden I was around super smart people who had tremendous means and just wanted to go run their parents’ company and have a martini by five o’clock.
And I was like, “how did I get in this place”? I’m so fortunate. “I wanna do something. I wanna change the world.“
And my mom saw —like Day One of school— “they’re showing this movie, Grand Illusion by John Renoir. “ou might wanna check it out.” I went to see it and there was one other kid in the theater and I was blown away.
It’s a movie about the World War I and (how) hopefully there will never be a war again. It didn’t quite work out that way. But it was novelistic and I was super moved and I was like “wow”. But I was gonna change the world.That was my goal. And I wasn’t, I didn’t know anyone in the (film) business.
I never knew — heard of — anyone going into the (film) business. I thought it was out of my reach and I’m a restless sort. And when I went to college, I dropped out soon after because I wanted to be in the action and I started working in community organizing politics. And I was pretty good at it, so they sent me on the road.
And so I’m a 19-year-old kid, not knowing anybody, anywhere. And I didn’t really drink. That was about the only option in most of these places I went to — except to go see movies. And this was in the early eighties. And. I know a lot of people like Tony Scott’s movies and other folks who made movies in the eighties, but I didn’t.
And I was getting really angry and I found this music, punk rock, right? And wow. That’s how I feel, right? So that, and they have this kind of ethos that, you can just pick up a guitar, yell, and your community will come out for you. So those two aspects of community organizing started working their way into my bloodstream.
And I went to movies obsessively, and I didn’t like them. I was really angry at those movies. So I was like, “I can make better movies”; even though I had no knowledge of how, I applied to NYU Film School and forgot about it. And then one day, I got a nice ride to go to NYU Film School. Sure.
And I arrived the year that She’s Gotta Have It, Blood Simple, Stranger than Paradise. And the year before was the film that sent me to NYU Smithereens by Susan Seidelmann, which was a punk rock tale. And, I was like, “wow, that’s what I wanna make. These are all really small movies. They speak to me and about the time I grew up in.” But NYU —where all those filmmakers, every single one of those filmmakers went to — was teaching “Hollywood filmmaking”.
There was no independent filmmaking yet. And you’re like, “wait what’s going on? They all found this thing. I wanna be part of that.“ So I left school again.
The way those films were getting funded were through mistakes made at the highest level regarding new technology, which at that point was VHS videos,
JL: right? [00:10:18]
Ted: A lot of the movies that were made did not have the poetry that we put into contracts now. Which is that language of I’m licensing this music for “any technology now known or hereafter devised…
JL: …throughout the universe into outer space.
Ted: Exactly. And “all dimensions” now. You couldn’t watch John Sayles’ Baby, It’s You because they didn’t have the proper licensing for the Springsteen music that was in it.
But that meant they had already set up all the loans for the neighborhood video stores, and there was nothing on the shelves. So a lot of people came up with ways to make movies cheaper —there was better technology — and get them quickly on the shelves.
And so I worked on a lot of really bad horror films as a production assistant. And you got the idea like “wait a second, we could borrow some of these methodologies. I got to produce my first movie at 23, which was a big break, but I quit the business after that because everybody was on drugs; they were fighting with each other.
It was like the world doesn’t need more young film producers; they need drug counselors. I’m gonna go and be a drug counselor. You have to study for that, and that was not one of my strong suits. So I got “pulled back in’ for an “incredible” opportunity — producing a movie that had a hundred thousand dollars budget. No script, no location, no cast. Had a shoot in four weeks from then, but they had a title…
It was The Incredible Rituals of the Undead Leather Witches From Hell.
JL: short title.
Ted: We actually figured out what the movie was. We had to change the title. It came out as a Doom Asylum, and I was really embarrassed about it until I saw that. I’m not gonna get her name right, forgive me, but one of the actresses from Sex and the City, it was her first role.
Okay. And she had it on her resume and I was like, “if she can own it, I can own it.”
And the funny thing, like it was one of those films that got licensed by HBO and people fell in love with it because it was so silly. Yeah, we had to come up with a movie. We found an insane asylum that had been abandoned.
And it was like, “what can we shoot in four weeks now? How about it’s high school graduation, four good kids and four bad kids all go to party at the insane asylum and guess what’s there? A monster? Of course, right?“.
It was a silly film, but it had its, spirit, right? And, I would tell my friend who I wanted to produce f how we did that. And his cousin was working on another bunch of micro budget stupid movies that always would sign Lance Hendrickson to come star (the guy from the Alien movies.
They would sign ‘em to a contract to shoot four movies in four days. One as like a mafia guy, one as a civil war guy, one as a science fiction, and just run ‘em through costumes and then hire a bunch of film students to figure out how all these different actors who we had to do the same costume changes could all be in the same movie together.
“Make it all fit and we’ll cast somebody to connect them.” Yeah. That’s great. And the guy that we would tell all that to was a director named Hal Hartley. And I spent about three years trying to make what we thought were “real movies” with him until he got fed up with me and he said one day, “come to Grand Central Station, I wanna show you where I grew up.”
It’s a little weird for your friend to say that, you know, but I did and he handed me a script on the train and said, “I just wrote this two weeks ago. I know where every location is and I know where the sun is at that time of day. ‘cause I wrote it for the two blocks that I grew up in”.
And that was a movie called The Unbelievable Truth.
It costs us $55,000 to get it into the can. We shot short ends —pre-video! == 35 millimeter. We shot a two to one ratio. Two to one ratio! Wow! And it costs us another a hundred thousand dollars to finish the film after afterwards, but we sold it to an upstart distributor. By a guy named Harvey Weinstein for 250 (thousand).
We didn’t know enough to put anybody on contract. Everyone was non-union. And on December 23rd, we distributed the profit. So everyone got a full union wage for the 11 or 12 days they worked on the movie. And …
JL: We call that deferred now. [00:14:59]
Ted: We, yeah but it was (paid off) quick. The remarkable thing on that movie? 22 people —22 people (on the cast and crew) — went on to direct feature films. Wow. I don’t know if anyone watched the Rick Linkletter movie on Netflix called Nouvelle Vague on the French new Wave, and at the end of — it’s about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, and at the end of it, they explain that over that next year, over 100 people went on to make feature films. So we didn’t quite hit those numbers, but amongst the 22 people were our wardrobe supervisor, Kelly Reichardt. Like people that there, there was a good group of people who went out and made movies. Granted, one of ‘em made a movie called Surf Nazis Must Die, but…
JL: they should, Damn surf Nazis.
Ted: They got a lot made and I think it spoke of how when you come together for passion — when you are willing to do things for love together in a collaborative way— it changes the rules.
We wanted to make another movie right after that. We didn’t have the money. Everyone showed up to work on that film. We got the money within two months.
That was our second film. We got up to a $700,000 budget. Hal Hartley, that director, is very much what I would call a NonDē director. Now, he owns all of his movies, he distributes his movies. He works with a really small footprint and does exactly what he wants to do with no one telling him what to do.
And so you start to see that you can find, if you can spot some cracks and find your way, that’s where the light gets in.
JL: So essentially you’re describing the indie film scene at this point, right? Versus the studio system? [00:16:48]
Ted: Yeah we, we definitely liked the vibe that we saw in Spike Lee’s and the Coen Brothers, Jarmusch & Seidelman’s movies.
And you start to see… the phrase I use is… how do you “let somebody’s freak flag fly?” How do you get them to encourage whatever is the unique aspect of them —the decisive element that makes it pop — that nobody else can replicate? And those were all of our early movies.
It is so similar to this moment we’re living in now… in a couple of ways.
One of the reasons it’s hard for somebody to break into the industry — where it’s hard for somebody to make films for grownups.or make films for a super specific audience — is there’s a huge differential in the marketplace right now where the perceived value of a film is much lower than the actual value of a film.
The irony of these times that we live in is it’s easier to get your film out, but a lot harder to get your film seen. And how do we start to deal with that? I’m pretty good at predicting the different budget levels you can make a film for, and predicting the different values that the world will assign to them.
And I can tell you right now the gulf between perceived value and actual value is somewhere between 40 and 60% on the basis. So what happened back in the late eighties, early nineties was because of the technology changing, because people starting to recognize how to make movies inexpensively, there was a abundance of supply and that helped change that differential.
So in the beginning (of the 90’s), we wouldn’t get paid what our films were worth, but you did have a profit participation. So we made this movie early on that nobody believed in. We raised the money for it the way that we always raised money for our film, which was to cut the budget in half. And it’s “oh, you have half the funding? We can complete the funding for you. How? Cut the budget in half.”
And we made this film, it was the first film cut on an Avid — the nonlinear digital editing machine— the first narrative feature (to do so). They made The Rumble In the Jungle - the Muhammad Ali - Forman fight film on an Avid.
But we were the first narrative to do it and as a result, we didn’t quite know what we were doing and we didn’t get a print out of the lab until the day we had to send it off to the film festivals. We got into the the festival of choice for us, which was the Berlin Film Festival. Big deal. But no sales agent would touch it.
We shipped it off to sales agents and they were like, “we don’t want this film. It’s gay, it’s Chinese. And it feel feels like a film from the 1940s”, right? Like “I’m not gonna touch it”. That film won the Golden Bear Grand Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet. It was just recently re made into a more modern movie and it was the film.
That had the highest ROI of any movie that year. It did a 42 times multiple, the number two film however, if you just took 1%, it would’ve been worth something like 700 times of our money, right? 1% of that movie? That was a little movie called Jurassic Park. They didn’t do much with it afterwards. I think they hoped to make a sequel one day
The interesting thing was because no one would sell (The Wedding Banquet) for us, we had to sell it ourselves, and we didn’t really know what we were doing. We knew enough to think we knew enough to sell, but we probably didn’t. In the first sales meeting I had with somebody who wanted to buy it, they said, “so what do you wanna do with this?”
I said — I didn’t discuss it with my business partner. In the beginning, he wanted to kill me; laterm gee loved me for it. I was like “we’re only gonna license it for six years to everybody:. And the guy looked at me. I think he evaluated that these guys won’t be around very long, so he said :sure, son I’ll license it for six years”.
And so the next meeting was like, “Hey, you know that guy from Australia who bought the film? We sold it to him on a six year license. We’re only doing six year license.: Everyone signed a six year license and proceeded to license it to their local television station on a 15 year contract! Wow. So in the seventh year we started suing everybody.
We had to actually bring three companies to court, but we collected twice that money. ‘cause they had to pay us
JL: right?
Ted: The same amount for the second year license. ‘cause …
JL: they’d already committed to the local station.
Ted: Yeah. So instead of a 42 times multiple, it was actually an 84 times multiple if you actually look at it.
Still wasn’t so much money, but it was still enough to keep my company going for a long time and recognize this would be one of those lessons: that the art, the audience, the artists all move much faster than the business or the markets do. Like we’re taught in America that the marketplace is wise; it will always adjust. It’ll move so much faster, but it gets stuck in deep ruts in every industry, and you have to start to look at it and figure out. How do I fix a differential?
JL: Yeah. [00:16:48]
Ted: How do I fix like the way they’re manipulating it against the people who don’t have power, and how can I start to, to get ahead of the curve, get to “where the puck is going to be”, as Wayne Gretzky said.
I think those things happen time and time again. We are living in a moment where that differential is really high, where the power thinks is one way to do things, and yet there’s a huge number of other ways to do things. We are fortunate that the technology on the manufacturing and the distribution has improved so much.
But it’s in the hands of folks who wanna just —for some reason — keep earning all the money they’re earning. So what can we start to do?
I believe we’re in another major disruption. People talk about global streaming as this huge disruption, but I think the disintermediation of distribution, the decentralization of distribution, is going to be the next big disruption.
And we see this already in the big realms of the folks who had to already from other cultural industries, had their business disintermediated, cutting out the middleman, is what that stupid word means. Essentially middle person. They recognized they needed to develop a direct relationship with their audience, right?
So the most successful startup of a film studio in America is called “Taylor Swift”, right? You know that she already had her mailing list of millions and millions of fans and cut out the distributor twice now and has had two films that made over 30 million.
JL: And that was at AMC, I think theater, right?
Ted: Yeah. They went directly to AMC and then just recently, Markiplier with Iron Lung did the same sort of thing. Now they are folks who have spent years building their audiences and were successful in a different realm. But meanwhile, on the quiet level, whether it’s our film with Invisible Nation, which you can come see here tomorrow night, I believe, at 7:00 PM outside of the festival.
But that’s, ‘cause we are a very old movie now, two and a half years old. But, or movies like Secret Mall Apartment, or other things where filmmakers have done it, we’re at a place where you can do that. Unfortunately, the support organizations that we have, haven’t really trained all the service providers that we need.
To do this, like there’s a learning gap that’s there. I believe that there are actually about 300 jobs right now that are needed that would pay somewhere between $75,000 and $125,000 a year —which is pretty significant —particularly since you only would have to do it part-time. What are those jobs, right?
Those jobs are filling in the gaps of what we allowed to rust and disappear. So this would be another one, like “how do you build audiences?”. In any closed ecosystem where the dominant power capital or audience believes the system is good enough —say… indie film — you won’t have the necessary investment in the operational improvements to of the product or the process; so what happens over time is like where frogs in the pot, not realizing: “we are the next course for dinner”.
You can look at many things (as examples of this). We are here now my wife Vanessa, and I., because we’re on a sponsored college tour that we were able to raise money to tour 20 different colleges with our film. Every independent film ends up going to colleges and has for 40 years. So let’s just say that’s 500 films a year for 40 years. And yet nobody captured that institutional knowledge. So it could be replicable from one film to the next. Everybody has to reinvent the wheel. Let me tell you. It’s a pain in the butt to do. We partnered with a student organization, we partnered with a community organization, both sides in, invested in our movie from different for different reasons. And we were able to bring the film around and then we knew we were here. And so I reached out. “Can I come and talk?”
JL: Yeah.
Ted: Because, I like to talk.
JL: No, you’re quiet,
Ted: But there are so many of these little things that are needed. We’re airing on public television, partially because our movie’s really good and people wanted to see it, but also partially because I realized how that system was also broken and how we could improve it for ourselves and hopefully, ‘cause I’ve now pitched American Public Television on this model, hopefully for about 12 other films a year going forward. We can talk about that later if people want on what that is.
But again. Yeah, nobody had to fix anything ‘cause they thought it was good enough. And you can see this so many different places, not the least of which, I’ve been singing the same song on Substack for three years, which is build your own audience.
Build your own audience. So over those three years, I’ve been able to build a mailing list of 30,000 people across 175 countries. Now granted. I’m an old guy. I’ve been around, I’ve done a bunch of stuff. I have some privilege that other people don’t have. But Substack, when I joined, said to me, they thought anyone that was bringing a movie out that had a product to sell could within three years build an audience of 25,000 people.
I don’t know if they’d say that today. The guy that said that to me left Substack last month. No. But frankly, to start a service, helping people build their audience, this era where you will have a direct relationship with your audience is going to be super transformative.
The disintermediate distribution is a key part of that, as is you moving out of a transactional mindset. IEI have to sell tickets, I have to make money and moving more into a community minded way of thinking. So what we often talk about is, we first try to identify the customers, turn them into our audience, transition them into our community, and incentivize them to become our collaborators.
That process, which means you have to look out for them. That’s what a community is right here, right now in this room is you’re saying, I’m gonna cover your back to the person next to you. And when you start to do that, your possibilities become much more. Yeah. And that’s what’s so exciting about what’s happening on what we call film stack.
The community. Substack that cares about film is it’s really positioned where we’re trying to be supportive, not just self-interested, trying to be transparent, collecting the data, sharing the data, sharing the recommended best practices, because frankly, that’s what’s needed, not just for you to work well in your career, but to preserve things like democracy like.
Love, like working together, we have to do the things that bring us joy and pleasure and bring each other that, and recognize it’s not all just about getting the money into our wallets, but in the process sometimes that’s what you get in return. And that’s wonderful.
JL: Yeah.
Ted: And I really do believe that we, with that we can transition from what has been a cultural industry predicated on genius, and instead move to one that’s about “how do we lift the good into the better and perhaps the great”… right?
I see about 50 films a year that I really respect, that I think are really excellent films, (that happens) consistently — and that’s whether we make a ton of movies or we don’t — that’s the “genius”, right? (The genius are) those 50 people across the globe who make remarkable movies every year.
But watching what happened through “Peak Content”, the birth of The Global Streaming Platforms, and all the money that’s in there, you saw a huge increase of the good, of the interesting.
And yet we never developed those processes to lift that good into something better.
I went to the Toronto Film Festival —when I still worked for Amazon —and I saw this remarkable movie, but it was kinda long and a little slow in parts, and some people were put off by certain elements. I was the only one (buyer) that bid on that movie, I offered a very fair price ‘cause Amazon let me.
I said to the director, “I’m giving you creative control, but I want you to sit with me ‘cause I think there’s 20 minutes that can come out of the movie.” He was protected. He knew that he didn’t have to agree to anything. We took 20 minutes out of the movie. It won the Oscar for Best Editing and Best Sound. It was made for $2 million. Called The Sound of Metal. It got five Oscar nominations and won two.
That’s not me. That was all already there (in the movie). My notes were in accordance with the film that I saw, (in accordance with) the director’s voice.
And they recognized what I recognized. They had a rush to get into the festival. But most people would stop (there). They would say that movie debuted, it’s good enough. Don’t bother producing for excellence; it’s labor and it’s time intensive and it’s a strain.
JL:. But essentially you don’t mention the name and obviously not but something that Weinstein used to do all the time. To some degree, to reedit the films or to make them a little more poppy for that environment.
Ted: But to understand the difference of that, I made a film called In the Bedroom with Todd Field. It was originally made for two and a half million. And then we got an Academy Award-winning composer to agree to do the score for free. So that was another $350,000.
That usually gets a laugh, I didn’t deliver it right.
JL: Nobody had coffee like we did, I guess.
Ted: we sold that film at the Sundance Film Festival to Harvey Weinstein. We knew we had two minutes to cut out of the movie. The contract with Harvey said that I had final cut.
I told Todd ”You have to recognize we’re entering The Beast and it’s a culture that they will cut up your movie, right? But we can preserve it and in the end, we have to keep our eye on the prize, which is make sure the movie comes out and they support it.”
He took out a second mortgage. He developed a double bleeding ulcer trying to protect this film because although we had a release date in November, it was August and they had cut up the movie several times, tested it several times. Our cut kept performing better.
Harvey wouldn’t let up. And we didn’t know what to do. And luckily there were — I knew I had a war story somewhere!— there were people at the company who really believed in the movie and they told us, “Okay, this is what you have to do: Todd, you have to fly from LA to New York. Tomorrow night, Harvey’s having dinner with Marty at this spot. You have to go in, pretend that you just walked in and Harvey will have you sit down and talk and then you gotta get Marty to agree to watch your movie.”
And Todd, He also made the movies Tar and Little Children. He’s a master, but he was also an actor. He was in Eyes Wide Shut and many other films. We’d cast him off of a Ruby in Paradise — a nice Florida movie. Previously he did a movie… the first film I did with Nicole Holofcener (Walking and Talking), he was in that and, Todd was able to, do that kind of thing.
JL: It’s like an episode of The Studio, so now you got these guys having dinner,
Ted: Except it’s real life. Its funny. Vanessa loves that show. I can’t watch it because… I’m sorry: people that work in the business are much smarter than those characters on tv.
JL: Dumb ‘em down a little bit,
Ted: Harvey agreed to let Marty watch it and decide. I was thrilled because I got to call Thelma Schumacher and say, “what do you think?”.
And she said, “"Oh, we really love the movie, but we have some notes.”
“Oh great. Can you tell me what they are?”.
She said “Let me talk to Marty and get back to you”.
One day goes by, two days, three days. It’s a week. What’s happening? Finally, Thelma calls and said, “We can’t talk. We love the movie. Yes, there’s some work, but we’re not gonna get involved in this.”
Harvey called us into the office and — this is a while back, right?. So he had all these video decks, one full wall. Top to bottom of video decks. And he said, “All right, here’s what’s gonna happen.”
— I can’t do voices, so I’m not gonna do it, but …
“We’re gonna play your version against my version and decide which one is better.”
And the first cut he shows us, and it was like, “Harvey, I know you love movies, but that was such an inelegant cut. Like the audience will lose the audience on that first cut.”
And he was like, “Shut the fuck up, Hope.” He threw something at me!
And he was like, “I was gonna ask you to produce my first feature, but now I’m gonna ask Anthony Minghella to do it because, his movies aren’t, half as long as yours.
“They’re twice as long. Harvey twice as long.” But I didn’t let on that I knew that Harvey had already directed a movie — and people thought he was such a distribution genius. He made a movie called Playing For Keeps. It was a Jewish family movie that they released on Yom Kippur. If you’re such a good distributor, like why are you releasing it on that day? But maybe he didn’t want anyone to see it.
JL: Possibly.
Ted: At least he was letting it go. But in the end, after three and a half hours, of back and forth, and we’re only like 30 minutes into the film, he said “Okay. You guys win. Your film can stand.”
Wow.
“But you have to cut two minutes out of it” — which was what was in our contract, which is what we wanted to do anyways. Wow. And the crazy thing was like we realized he was chasing his 11th best picture nomination in a row. His other films were The Shipping News —which everyone who saw that movie, knew that it wasn’t going to get an Oscar nomination —and Amelie, which is a super beautiful film, but at that point in time, Americans would never vote for a foreign language film, a non-English language film for Best Picture. So it didn’t even get in that race. So we were his last bet.
But that little movie, which he paid $1 million for, that cost a total of close to $3 million? He spent $22 million trying to get nominations. It made $30 million of the box office, but that doesn’t mean you get $22 million back. And he got five nominations on it. Yeah. Which up until movies like Moonlight —another Florida movie! There you go— was one of the lowest budgeted films to get a ton (of nominations)
JL: Wow. Yeah. So you’ve, you won that battle?
Ted: I won that battle, and that’s in my book if you happen to find a copy of it anywhere.
JL: Yeah. Hope For Film. So that, that’s interesting because it, it’s like you’re breaking down everything that has to do with this structure and this process.
But going back to this NonDē idea, ‘cause I think a lot of folks here who are in that space now wondering what to do with their film. If they have a film in the festival or they’re developing their next project. What are some of the key points to follow this new practice to get their films out there properly into the world?
Ted: I’ve been trying to capture what all that may be. I always find it curious of what we hold inside of ourselves without giving voice (to it) and then when that voice comes out.
So I’d written out like 24 components (of NonDē) before I found the most important one, which I only wrote about recently. So number 25, doesn’t sound like a business or even a creative idea, but I actually think it’s both.
And that is making sure you structure it so that you enjoy the process. I think that if you look at the last 20 years — it’s when we really moved to fully a transactional obsession our culture —we push that (joy) away.
Like so many people, whether “I’m storyboarding my whole movie and doing exactly what’s in my storyboard'“ so no serendipity gets in, no accidents come along. And no happy accidents along the way. You start to see, the folks that think, “art is like war; I’m the general and you have to follow what I say, and it’s life and death. “
I would say “No.We are playing in the sandbox. And you want to do that.”
There’s a filmmaker that my wife got to interview recently that has a film that just came out, He’s named Pete Ohs. he spent seven years making his first film. Trying to get $200,000 and he had a miserable experience and he decided from then on he wanted to try to do it in a way that was joyful and that meant for him learning how to make movies for $10,000.
And he has a beautiful metaphor for explaining it, which is he says like each movie is a table of bubbles: it can take no pressure whatsoever other than keeping it afloat. Wow.
And he shoots and he edits. He works from more of a treatment than a script. He brings the actors in and he makes them (in such a way) so that in the end, if they don’t work, there’s no great losss. A
When I was my most active producing — and this is true, like across studio executives and so on— I had a one in eight (would be)10 x multiple, right? So one out of every eight films did 10 times (its cost). So you do the math and you are in profit across all those movies, and that’s what he’s thinking. Not every one of these movies have to come out, but I need to have one in the group do really well. And I loved his new movie, which is called Erupcja. I don’t speak Polish, but it’s “eruption” in Polish .
I think that when I was trying to put out principles of NonDē, I wasn’t budget obsessed at that point. Okay. I didn’t think that was such a necessary (attribute), but I do think that if we can make our work in a way that removes some of that pressure at a significant level, you’re able to bring back in a different type of playfulness.
That does probably mean we need to find side hustles, other ways to earn our livings along the way, which might be those services that I mentioned in the beginning that are missing from our ecosystem. I think like it starts to change the whole concept of who gets to make movies and why, so that we actually are able to make movies for our communities.
And then we can start to develop the infrastructure that is needed to make sure our communities get that regular cadence of supply at a consistent quality in an environment that they trust and want to participate in.
When I look at distribution, I see a cookie cutter checklist way that we go about doing it. Like four different models, which require that our films cover the mainstream,cover things that connect all of us. I don’t wanna make He-Man Masters of the Universe, and I would argue that (such a film) doesn’t really connect us, right?
I’ve always liked those super specific niche films. Christine Vachon —one of the great indie producers — has a line that we used to both use, but it was her line. I have to give it credit. This was like at 2000… How do you determine who to make a movie for?
And it was like, “do they have a parade? If they’re getting together for a parade, we’ll make a movie for them.” But I actually think it’s much more narrow than that. And in that specificity is where you find universatility, right?
JL: Agreed.
Ted: Yeah. Yeah. So like The Wedding Banquet story, nobody wanted it because they thought it was too specific.
But the truth is everyone saw their family in it, right? Whether it was they were gay, whether they were Chinese, whether they’d seen a lot of films from the forties, they still saw their story in it. I believe we’ve gotten trapped in this rut where, whether it’s Save the Cat or the Hero’s Journey or any of these other textbooks, we start to see “the formula”, right?
Why is there a huge surge in repertory cinema amongst young people? Because films from the nineties and before didn’t feel so corporately programmed. They had a freakiness to them… a something that made you a little uncomfortable sometimes... cringe.
How do we get to that place where we don’t feel we’re just trying to make it palatable, but we’re speaking truth?
JL: Yeah. No, and it makes a lot of sense because, and another thing that the festival does great is program so many amazing local films. Miami stories told for Miamians in a sense. And so you’re saying that’s not a lost cause, that’s actually the future. Of creating those types of stories.
Ted: Absolutely, and I think the more that we start to get specific to different communities and supply that cadence, the more they’ll start showing up. Right there, there’s that real benefit.
When I work on a script, one of the things that I try to do is help the project speak secret languages.
JL: Okay…
Ted: That’s a just a phrase I use, but what is that trying to say? Instead of an A theme and a B theme, I look at 25 themes. And I’m not looking to pay them off. I’m not looking to give them an arc. I’m asking them to speak to the audience and let them feel seen and heard — because somehow (that is how) we connect.
Like I know that there are a lot of times that I see a little thing and I think it’s just there for me, my own private Easter egg. Sure. And I think we wanna plant those.
When I work, I have a time in the development process where I’m trying to heighten the cinematic potential of the script, and that’s looking through different references, visuals, audio, looking at the different elements of a character, and trying to make that stuff sing.
I don’t wanna just know what they want. Or what their goals are, what they might have longing for. I wanna understand the gulf between their thought and expression. Why haven’t they done this thing that they want? What might that be? And let me see a little clue.
Because maybe it speaks to my own experience in that way. And I think the more that we give that deeper humanity, the more we protect ourselves from what’s coming from the abundance of slop that will becoming — and I use AI to help my processes along the way… I don’t think we necessarily have to be afraid of it, but we have to be able to say, “damnit, I love that I am a weird little human, and I’m gonna use that to connect with other weird little humans.”
JL: And it makes sense. ‘cause I always say AI is always in the pursuit of perfection. I see. And what makes some of these stories great is the human imperfections, right?
The things where AI would tell you to go right, but you go left. And an audience actually tracks more to that because it feels personal and real. And that’s something that I don’t think any computer can replicate still.
That’s awesome. This talk helped people tremendously and I said at the beginning unlike Miami, we started early, but just like Miami, we’re finishing late, so we got it.
Thank you guys so much for coming. Thank you Ted, for doing this talk. I appreciate it.