NonDē --> Build your own sustainability!

Nondependent film, the future of independent film. Another "clarion call" post.

**I’ve had this post here for 3 weeks in an almost ready to go fashion. I will endeavor to not do that in the future. Be a little less precious and get things out to y’all. I need to get over the desire to perfect, because the end pieces are never actually perfect anyways!

A few weeks ago on a whatsapp group thread I read that one of the top streamers have started offering “zero dollar” MGs for acquisitions of fiction films where payment to the filmmakers would begin at 10m+ views. My first thought is this is bad and I guess if you’re doing a non-exclusive 2 year license to the said streamer it could be worse. But then the comments start to come in that this is their offer for exclusive 7 year plus licenses. This was pretty f’ing alarming. Then a few days later I read Ted Hope’s Substack chat 👇

How bad can things get? Word on the street is that at least 3 Global Streaming Platforms are now offering $0 MGs w payment only after you have 8 figure views (depending on service)? I guess everyone is expected to make movies for zero.

So the same scenario has expanded to three different streamers doing business with this approach. Ouch.

Things have clearly been going very south for independent film in the last few years but this is a serious low. We’ve been living through the phase where they’re not buying much and now when they DO buy, the standard line is zero dollars up front 🤔🤔🤔

We’ve weathered a bunch of different storms over the years and what’s been great about the community is our resilience and smarts to adapt and find a new way.

I know we will find a way.

People have already.

Check out my case study post for what films like Eno, Hundreds of Beavers etc are doing.

There are artists who are passionate and compelled to tell their stories so they will always find a way. There’re audiences who want to be reached by these stories so they will seek out the films the mainstream isn’t providing. That’s it, right?

Not this time.

And don’t worry I don’t mean not this time because we won’t find a way out. This time we need to find a way out AND not have this benefit the people who are crushing our film industry. Shit flows downstream and as we make lemonade from lemons, let the lemonade stand be for us and not the studios. Some exmaples...

1. When the studio system in the 60s was tanking and churning out films that weren’t connecting with audiences along came the easy riders and raging bulls who created a new wave of storytelling. Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Bogdanovich and others influenced by New Wave 🌊 of international filmmakers built “New Hollywood” and out of their independent spirit came the era of the studio blockbusters of Spielberg and Lucas. Filmmakers, Cinema and Audiences all benefitted out of this and of course so did the studios.

2. Similar thing happens out of the late 80s and early 90s. The Soderbergh generation pushes indie film into the public consciousness and builds a new wave 🌊...Sundance, Mirimax etc. Those filmmakers grow to make studio films, the studios build their sub labels like Focus, Searchlight, Touchstone and awards come the studio way too. Again the filmmakers rescues the ecosystem that the studios made stale.

3. Bunch of years later that Red Envelop company comes around and we all bounce and take the dollars streaming offers. It fuels our creativity, we build another wave 🌊 that we all ride. Folks are happy until the wave crashes and the bubble bursts. We’ve helped build Netflix to dominance and with that 100 foot wave crushed the ecosystem that supported distribution alternatives. We’re left with streaming or bust where $0 MGs could be the new normal aka today.

In all these and many other examples the creativity of those squeezed goes and builds the success and sustainability of the big corps.

We helped build what crushed us.

Let’s go a different path.

The newest wave 🌊 is already building. The water is getting sucked back out into the ocean and we can build this next wave differently with new structures that feeds the future waves of our new ecosystem where the filmmakers are the beneficiaries, not the studios or GSPs.

Filmmakers should own their creative work.

Filmmakers should own their relationship with audiences.

Filmmakers lead the distribution of their work in a sustainable way that fuels the next project and the next.

Filmmakers are going NonDē.

Plenty of folks writing about what’s going on.

Read about what Ryan Coogler did from Widdospeak. Read about why movies ain’t cool anymore and why that IS a problem from Notes from the Studio. Read about the future of SVOD streaming App from Roy Price. In that piece he also writes the following.

Create a platform for decentralized content funding

If people are going to build IP independently online, they will need a way to finance this activity. There’s a growing opportunity to build the first real capital market for digital-first IP, a place where fans and investors can fund creative projects—across film, TV, games, podcasts, animation, and more using tokenized securities.

Think AngelList meets Kickstarter meets NASDAQ.

Big streamers will always want things that have built in audience, so producers and creators will increasingly try to build IP on their own and this will be an economically viable way to develop.

This is something I’ve been thinking about this year and plotting plans. Stay tuned.

Let’s go NonDē filmmaking! Here’s a breakdown on how Ted Hope sees NonDē and how ChatGPT summarizes it.

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Welcome to the new subscribers. If you want to know what this substack is all about, start here and then work through some other older posts like this one and this one. Participate with your comments and suggestions. Share things you like and get your friends to stop by. This post I wrote about Theaters as Cultural Focal Points is a decent companion to today’s post.

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Ok now the plug part of the post...

One of the films I’m working on is now exclusively available via the film’s website. Go support NonDē film and watch Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story directly from the filmmakers!

Another film Maya and the Wave (keeping the wave vibe of the post) is doing fun things is it’s distribution. We’re in theaters still in US, Canada and Australia. On June 7th join the GLOBAL LIVE STREAM! This celebrates the online premiere of the award winning and audience thrilling film about big wave surfer and pioneer Maya Gabeira.