In this letter from Filmmaker Newsletter, Scott Macaulay questions the wisdom of showing your film into the festival, even if it’s not ready, in the hope of scoring well for your investors in the search for the minimum guarantee (MG).
What are your thoughts on this?
Editor's LetterThe Sundance Film Festival begins [this] week, but will the films be truly ready? While we’re in full prep mode—watching advance screenings, getting interviews and other pieces into our CMS—I was struck by an edition of Filmmaker contributing editor Anthony Kaufman’s newsletter that landed in my inbox. Titled “The Sundance Dash, and Why It’s Not Good for Filmmakers,” it begins with a link to a piece he wrote for us nearly 20 years ago, “Rush Jobs,” which spoke to filmmakers deciding whether or not to accelerate their post-productions in order to make the Sundance deadline. He writes, “I understand filmmaking is a capital-intensive practice, and one must consequently balance art and commerce, but making films to conform to festival deadlines seems like it might get in the way of quality.”
The piece, I realized, could have been written today, which is kind of remarkable. For filmmakers and producers eager to create the most impact and sales afterlife for their independently produced films, a Sundance berth remains massively important—an importance that hasn’t waned since when Anthony wrote that piece or even, really, since we founded this magazine in 1992. How many film organizations—or distributors, even—have retained that same level of clout for so many years? (Internationally, of course, Cannes, but I’m thinking about the U.S.).
While a decision to race a film’s post to make the Sundance deadline can be deleterious to the films themselves, as Anthony writes, it can also be, depending on the composition of the financing and filmmaking team, a necessary business decision. As producer Rebecca Green said in an article of mine from six years ago, “So You Didn’t Get Into Sundance, Redux,” “As a producer, you can’t not submit to Sundance. It’s kind of the only place that people are buying movies in a way that investors can recoup, and that’s the biggest problem with our system right now. There are just not a lot of opportunities to [sell a finished film] for a decent MG, which is why so many filmmakers are making films for under $200,000.”
Indeed, the decision to race a film to get into Sundance is often a decision made before the film was even shot. Investors are incentivized to put money into films because they might go to Park City Telling the team that a film is not ready is a tough conversation, but it’s also not one always driven by the business side. Sometimes it’s the director pushing and the business people holding back. In fact, I’ve seen many times financiers take a back seat to the process and say, “Okay, we’ll try Sundance, but if you don’t get in it’s time to bring on a new editor.”
But this talk about whether or not to submit to Sundance is ultimately about something more. As I wrote in that same piece linked above, “The very real issue of not getting into one festival, Sundance, is ultimately a proxy for the larger existential issue facing independent film in general: the absence of a viable, self-sustaining marketplace for finished films.” Six years later that statement, along with Green’s, still rings true too, it seems.
For those of us making independent work, the quest to build a better mousetrap—to rearrange the elements of production, marketing, sales and distribution in some new way—remains. As Brian Newman wrote today in his newsletter, Sundance, among many other things, is a place to commune and discuss such things. And to get inspired by movies. My embargoed voice can confidently say that there is some mindblowing work to be seen there. Hope to see you some of you in Park City.
Best,
Scott Macaulay
Editor-in-Chief
2 people like this
What great news for Stage 32 and United! If you're at Sundance don't miss this opportunity!
2 people like this
Gonna be such a cool event!