Youth in Hollywood

I wanted to follow up a bit on my earlier post about Hollywood being more of a young persons game (in general).

When we're young, most of us have a lot fewer responsibilities (eg - family, mortgage, etc), which means we can take more gambles on our time. Hence the moves by so many young people to spend a year as some producers intern hoping to make enough connections they can get a paying job.

Anyway, I don't mean the prior post or the changing big media dynamics to discourage young people from joining "the business." As a matter of fact, big media desperately needs young people with fresh ideas, particularly fresh business ideas that will help our storytelling mediums move into new business models. Or finding news ways to mix and match old business models with new distribution in a compelling way.

Lastly, if you *do* actually manage to get into the business in a meaningful way at a young age, you will learn a lot of things there are no other ways to learn.

Most of showbiz won't teach you to be the corporate 9-5'er type; so if that's what you're looking for, showbiz probably isn't for you. (though, let's be honest, how many people out there honestly think they're going to have a 40 year job at one company and retire in the US? I think that's a myth that's pretty well shredded by now, right?)

But it will teach you to be resourceful, and pay attention. Or in somecases, it'll force you to BS until you can't BS anymore and give up, go home, or BS someone with enough money that you actually fail upwards, which happens a lot on the network and studio sides.

So anyway, for those of you who love to learn, meet new people who do amazing things, and are ok with not having a steady paycheck, c'mon down!

Gambling in Media

As has been noted many times over the years, Hollywood is largely a "young persons business."

I happened across a quote in the interesting study above, that I think makes a spot-on judgement on the psychology of producers making content (emphasis mine):

A more puzzling question is why the producers persist in the face of declining audience figures. Here Wu and Huberman are a little more convincing. They argue that like gamblers, video producers overestimate the chance of winning when the probabilities are small.

And as one gets older, one tends to get wiser, and realize the truth of the above statement.

Now, that's not to say you can't still build an ok living out of making television shows or films, but I can tell you first hand that every single person still putting in 100 hour weeks as Associate Producers or PA's or whatever, ALL have their own ideas for their own shows, and that we all overestimate our chances of "winning." That is, the chance of selling your show and going on to make lots of $$ on it, are in reality, very slim.

Also, and more interesting psychologically (and sociologically) are the researchers findings that:

...the success of videos uploaded to YouTube suggest that quality has little affect on success and persistence seems to actually reduce it.

Read the short abstract in full - it has some interesting data, and as more studies like this get published, it'll be interesting to see how it changes media creation in the coming generations.

(hint on my position: how many bands and painters are there out there you've never heard of, but have made a living doing what they do? The same will hold true for media creators. Vast numbers will never make a dime at it, and will do it anyway.)

Artist as Marketer, Part 2

By the way, just to follow up on the Artist as Marketer thread I just posted, this is exactly what we did with our indie film, "Family."

In addition to the film itself, we (meaning the director, and myself as the producer) cut our own trailers, created our own printing artwork and silk screened DVD promos to hand out at the American Film Market, and I built the website myself (figure it out, y'all - plenty of tutorials on the web...).

This led to us selling the film to a reputable sales company, and while I'm not going to argue whether or not it's a *good* movie (I like my first film, Solitude, better), it'll actually make it's money back.

I've worked inside large production companies at the exec level, and can safely say that had "Family" gone through one of those, and/or a large distributor, the movie would never, ever recoup what was spent on it because we'd be paying off overhead forever and a day.

It IS possible to do your marketing and do it well. It just takes some creative thought and a little work - and for all you "creatives" out there, who think you're only responsible for your "vision" of your movie or television show or whatever, you're going to be into a world of hurt when your services are exchanged for those of others who are willing and able to contribute more than just ideas.

You Are the Marketer

As I've posted a few times about the realities of the evolving IP marketplace as dictated by the consumer and not the rights holder, Trent Reznor just keep on popping up with gems. This quote is one that terrifies most of the highest earners in creative businesses:

"As an artist, you are now the marketer."

Wait a minute, that means you're destroying my carefully crafted business model that relies upon delivering a highly-polished turd wrapped in sticky marketing hooks for "your people" to figure out how to sell... because if I tried to sell it on it's merits... well, then... uh... I'd be broke.

To which, I say, GOOD!

For the first time in a century it would be dependent upon the folks who call themselves the "creatives" to create their way into making better content, and figure out how to monetize and market it themselves.

And guess what, if you can't figure it out, it doesn't mean the market is betraying you, it probably means that either your content, or your business model, or your marketing (or all three), totally sucked. And you don't deserve to get paid for it.

Imagine how much more $$ you could make if you didn't have to pay for all the overhead from the (large) production company and the (large) distributor in making media? I can tell you right now that on a $7m production I've worked on, that somehow, the company and the distributor had to make at least another $3m on top of that just to cover overhead.

Now, this still leaves a gaping hole on "well, how do we finance our media projects" and that, my friends, is still very much an open discussion. I do not know how that is going to be solved, yet, but it will be.

Overheads will be smaller, budgets will be smaller, and if you're any good at what you do, your profit margins will be higher, and you'll be happier because you're dealing with a smaller number of schmoes upstream in the foodchain.