Matthew Hickman: Reflections of an Independent Screenwriting Fellowship Winner [cont’d]
About a month ago, there was this announcement:
The Black List and Cassian Elwes have announced the winner of their first Independent Screenwriting Fellowship.
Unrepresented screenwriter Matthew Hickman will attend the upcoming Sundance Film Festival with the producer behind 2013 awards contenders Lee Daniels’ The Butler, All Is Lost, Dallas Buyers Club and many other films.
Hickman was chosen based on his script An Elegy for Evelyn Francis, which was hosted on the Black List website. He beat nine other scripts with indie sensibilities from unrepresented writers with lifetime earnings of less than $5,000.
“I work at a regular job in retail. I don’t have contacts in the movie business,” Hickman said in a statement. “Despite this, I have always hoped that if I wrote stories which were good enough, eventually I would find people who wanted to help me bring them to life. For aspiring writers in my shoes, the Black List is our broadest, most credible link to the people who can do just that. They provide access to the kind of professionals who can help jumpstart a writer’s career, as I have been incredibly fortunate to discover in Cassian Elwes. This fellowship is the greatest opportunity that a writer like me could ask for, and I cannot thank [Black List co-founder] Franklin Leonard and Cassian enough for creating it.”
Elwes, who also spent 15 years arranging financing for nearly 300 films as the head of William Morris Independent, said of Hickman’s script, “I could not get it out of my mind. He wrote something that was both human and real and created a character that actresses will want to play. Matthew is exactly the type of writer I was hoping we would find through the Black List — a new original voice that could benefit from this experience that he will receive in Sundance. I could not be more grateful to the Black List for helping me create this fellowship, and I hope Matthew gets from the experience as much as I know I will.”
Matthew has kindly agreed to write a public journal of his experiences before, during and after the Sundance Film Festival, and allow me to share them with you. Here is the second part of a dispatch he sent me from the Festival:
Aside from that, I’ve been spending time with Cassian, who is in the process of giving me a peerless education in the nitty gritty business of actually taking the thing I type on a computer and turning it into something that they show in theaters. It’s clear after listening to him talk for less than five minutes that he is the best champion a young filmmaker could ask for, and one who will balance out all the things that a writer does with real knowledge about what to expect once the train of making a movie is set in motion. I’ll give you one example.
Independent movies, twenty years ago, were largely financed by happenstance. You found a rich person, or a group of them if you were lucky, and persuaded them to put up the money for your movie. Sometimes people lost their asses, sometimes they struck it rich, but it was always an immense gamble. One of the methodologies that Cassian has helped develop over the past few years is a way of financing movies that makes that degree of risk more tolerable. For any of you writers out there still suffering PTSD from completing your high school or college math requirements, feel free to skip the next two paragraphs.
Instead of asking one or a few people to bear the entire burden of financing a movie, there’s a three-pronged approach which is common these days. As many of you know, several states now offer hefty tax credits to film productions in their state, in a bid to increase economic activity. These credits are often on the order of 20 to 25 percent, which is an enormous amount of money to be given for your movie’s production. The only slight problem is that these states won’t write you a check for the money until after production is complete. In order to get it up front for production expenses, the producers take loans from banks for the duration of shooting in an amount equivalent to the tax rebate, usually at an interest rate of five percent or so. That covers almost a quarter of your budget.
From there, producers will often sell the rights to their movie internationally before it is even made. How is this done? Producers usually have relationships with foreign sales companies, who will buy the rights to distribute the movie in any particular country. They’ll take a look at the script, see who is making it, look at the people involved, consider the performance of previous movies in the same genre, and make an estimate on the minimum that they’ll be able to generate in revenues from a particular territory. Based on that number, they’ll make an offer to purchase the rights of the film in Germany, Australia, Brazil, or almost anywhere. Where it seems like this used to be a process that occurred after the movie was made, foreign demand for American films has been so consistently reliable that these companies can now confidently buy the rights to distribute certain movies before shooting has even begun and know that they’ll receive a return on their investment. Foreign pre-sales now occur before and even during the shooting of a movie, and often account for anywhere between sixty and ninety percent of an independent movie’s budget.
Combining those two sources of money with the third traditional source, private investors, allows producers to complete the picture. Rather than ask these people to fund the entire movie, however, they’re now only asked to back anywhere from fifteen to twenty percent, but with a beautiful upside — every dollar that the movie makes they are usually given half of, for contributing only a small fraction of the budget.
It’s a world I knew nothing about before now, and I’m sure I only understand it now in the broadest strokes possible. But it’s a start, and in a business where it seems writers are sometimes woefully uneducated about what happens after their work is done, it’s something that at the very least I think can help us empathize with the job of the producer.
Between this, watching several movies a day, and the change in altitude, you can imagine my head feels as if it is slightly spinning. Aside from that, Franklin and I did an interview with YouTube that was live-streamed on their homepage earlier this morning. Cassian and I spoke to Kim Masters from KCRW’s the Business. Both of them were incredible opportunities that seemed slightly surreal in the moments they were being recorded. I’ll try to find a clip of these and post them in my next dispatch. For now, here’s a shot of Park City that I took this afternoon from just off of Main Street, where most of the action is. Talk to you all again soon.
That’s the straight stuff re indie film financing. Cassian should know: He’s the producer who found the final funding to enable Dallas Buyers Club to get made, among many, many other movies he’s produced.
To read the first part of Matthew’s dispatch from Sundance, go here.
To read Matthew’s entire first dispatch, go here.