Resentment: Film Finance For Dummies

Dummies like me, who are determined to make a movie

The first dollar is always special: a behind-the-scenes photo from the set of Resentment

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My last two posts on making my feature film were all about the script: where the idea came from, how I wrote it, and then how it changed over the course of revision. A script, though, is just a plan for a film. Making the film is a much larger endeavor—and a much more expensive one as well. Making movies—even in this day and age when any guy with an iPhone can be a filmmaker—costs money. So my next task was to raise the money. What made me think I could do that?

As some of you probably know, my first career was in finance. When I left finance to pursue my creative ambitions, the main thing I wanted to do was write—which had been my original ambition out of college—and, specifically, write movies. Why movies? Because I loved them, because I thought I could benefit from their relatively more structured nature and short length as compared with novels, and because most of the ideas I had at the time felt more like movies than like anything else.

So that’s what I did. I took the screenwriting sequence of courses at NYU, and I started writing. Very quickly, though, I got sucked back into the finance side of things. I got in contact with a former colleague who had left finance several years earlier to become a film producer. Now he was leaving producing to start a film investment fund and wanted my help in thinking about how to present it to potential investors, which I offered to the best of my ability. Eventually I wrote a script that I thought was good enough to sell, and he put me in touch with a New York-based independent film production company that he had worked with in the past thinking they might give it a serious look. They passed on it, but I liked them, and they seemed to like me. I wanted to learn more about actually making movies, and a relationship with them seemed like the most promising avenue. So I asked them if they would share with me the scripts they were looking at, which they happily did. I fell in love with one of them, which, it turned out, they were already committed to producing; I offered to help with that effort, and that’s how I wound up coming on as an executive producer on Infinitely Polar Bear.

My job was basically to raise funds to cover a small portion of the budget from my old Wall Street colleagues (and also to invest myself, which I knew I had to do if I was going to convince anyone else to come on board). In the course of doing that, I learned something about how indie film budgets with financeable casts were built in those days. In a nutshell, you built a budget based on what you thought you could sell the film for internationally, and then you tested those estimates by pre-selling some number of overseas territories based on the genre, script, director and cast. With evidence in hand that the market was roughly where you believed it to be, you could go to equity investors with a straightforward proposition: provided the producers executed effectively, bringing the film in on-time and in-budget, and provided the market didn’t move significantly, foreign sales would be sufficient to cover the budget, and any proceeds from a domestic sale would be their profit. And by “proceeds” I mean the minimum guarantee offered by a distributor; any actual box office returns beyond what the distributor needed to recoup its expenses would be further profit. Tax credits and loans against the pre-sold territories would provide additional production funds, so that in the end every equity dollar was leveraged, potentially as much as 2:1.

It was a good model, relatively conservative for something as risky as film and easy to explain to investors. Following it, they had already made multiple films with legitimate artistic ambitions. I worked with them on three films, four if you count a project that never got made, all based on the same model.

By the time I was looking to raise money for Resentment, though, that model had long since become obsolete. Foreign markets weren’t as interested in American independent film as they had been, streaming had completely upended film economics, distributors were far less willing to offer a minimum guarantee to any but the most promising films, and the very concept of a “bankable” star had come to be questioned. There was and remains a robust market for genre films—not only extraordinary breakout successes like Backrooms but for more typical fare as well—but the kinds of films I was interested in were much harder to finance than they used to be, even with highly marketable casts.

So how was I going to raise the money for Resentment?

Before I answer that, you might be wondering: why did I have to raise the money for Resentment? The simple answer is: I didn’t know anyone else who was going to do it for me. I showed the script to multiple producers, both people I already knew and people I cold-called or got introduced to through people I knew. Some told me they liked the script, but they couldn't afford to take on such a small project. Others didn’t feel they could raise money for a project of this type. One offered to raise money if I would hire his protégé as a physical producer and line producer, which, after meeting her, I was enthusiastic about doing—but then she landed an HBO show which she couldn’t afford to turn down. Getting an established production company behind the film would have meant a huge leg up in terms of getting distribution, and I got it to several, but many of them were looking for projects that were already packaged, with financeable cast attached; those that weren’t were reluctant to take on a project that didn’t come with the imprimatur of a well-known lab or incubator. In the end we wound up bringing on an executive producer who was an invaluable adviser with a lot of experience, and a young producer of enormous energy and very promising talent, but neither of them brought money to the table.

So I prepared to reach out to the people I knew who I thought might be both willing and able to put money into a film with a very high risk of not getting all their money back. The first thing I needed for that endeavor—actually, I needed it before approaching producers—was a proper pitch deck, something I truly dreaded putting together.

I’ve seen dozens of pitch decks for films over the years, and they are all over the map in terms of length and style. Some are designed in great detail with a view to enticing the reader with the aesthetic experience (hopefully one that dovetails with the intended aesthetic of the film, though I’ve seen some that seem more interested in being enticing than in being accurate). Others are glorified Powerpoint presentations, minimally designed and focused on highlighting the most commercial elements of the project (particularly attached cast). Since I was going to be looking for money without any cast attached, I needed to lean heavily toward the aesthetic side of that range. And since I wasn’t pitching a genre film, I needed to sell the story.

This was something I deeply disliked doing. I’m one of those precious creative types who wants the work to speak for itself, whether that’s a script or a completed film; I don’t want to frame it for the prospective reader or viewer or to seduce them with something other than the thing itself. I am aware that this is a foolish attitude that I have labored to break myself of, but it’s a constant and ongoing struggle. For example, you may have noticed that even in these posts I haven’t described the actual story of my film in any detail. I’m telling the story of the making of the film, which I hope is interesting in its own right, and I want readers to be eager to see Resentment when it comes available to stream later this summer without knowing so much about what it is that their first experience is tainted. I suspect this is the wrong approach.

Whether or not it’s the wrong approach for this Substack, it is definitely an untenable approach for approaching investors. I needed to pitch the film. Fortunately, I got the assistance of a talented producer friend who also did graphic design work on the side. She patiently watched me write draft after draft of the pitch that refused to do what needed to be done, and give me the necessary gentle but firm feedback that forced me to finally bite the bullet. In the process of biting, I learned a very important things about making a pitch deck: that it’s a valuable tool for focusing your thinking about the film itself.

People say this about scripts, that pitching helps you improve your screenwriting because boiling your story down to come up with a synopsis leaves its most basic flaws exposed, while you still have time to correct them. I’ve seen that process work, but I’ve also seen it fail in that I’ve seen it wreck scripts that were more interesting—and in my view better—before they were turned into a product to be marketed. But making a pitch deck was particularly helpful for me because it made me focus on the transition from script to screen. Pouring through hundreds of reference images from other films, for example, that could be used to represent my own forced me to think with much more specificity about how I wanted my own film to be shot. I was going to have to talk to my cinematographer, my actors, and all of my department heads about the creative vision I was pursuing with the film. Making the pitch deck helped me find specific language for that, whether verbal or visual (the visuals in a pitch deck matter a lot more than the words), and in the process it made me see what aesthetic questions I needed to think about more clearly before I could even look for the language of my answers.

The other thing I needed before I could approach investors was a budget. Early on, before I had anyone on board, I hired a line producer to create a preliminary budget. That budget came in significantly above what I originally hoped, so I checked with two other producers I knew to make sure I wasn’t off base, and they confirmed that original estimate; if anything, they thought it was still a little low. The producer who eventually came on largely agreed as well. So we set the ceiling for how much we could raise under the terms of the offering agreement significantly above that estimated budget level, simply because there are so many uncertainties associated with making a film—and it’s a good thing too, because even before we got into preproduction proper it was clear that our budget was indeed too low.

The most important decision we made fairly early (though after we’d already raised some of the money) that shaped the subsequent budget was the decision to shoot on a set. Most of the action of the film was set in a cocktail bar, and I had always anticipated shooting on location, either in a working bar or in a bar that had recently closed. I even scouted a former bar that had been turned into a permanent movie set, one that was owned by an independent film director, hoping that he would do a fellow director a good turn and give it to me for a very low rate. He was happy to do that—until he learned that I needed it for two or three weeks to shoot most of a feature. If I needed it for a day or two, he said, he would happily let us slip in between other bookings at a low rate. But two or three weeks would be much too expensive. HBO would pay him $20,000 per day to shoot there. He couldn’t afford to pass up that kind of money.

Shooting in a working bar, meanwhile, would have posed its own unique expenses. No bar would shut down for an extended period, so we’d need to shoot in off hours, coming in before dawn, shooting all day, and leaving a couple of hours before opening. It would be enormously costly in terms of time to load in and wrap out every day, dress and light the set and put everything back into proper continuity with where we had left things the day before. Our Assistant Director—the individual responsible for scheduling the shoot—estimated that the to compensate for the shorter shoot days we’d have to add several days to our schedule. That would have wound up costing more than renting a studio and building a set—and the latter would give us more control anyway. So we decided to go that route.

Then there was the question of where that studio would be. If we weren’t shooting on location, we could shoot anywhere—why not pick a cheap jurisdiction with a generous tax credit? But with essentially our entire team New York based, and the need to shoot exteriors on location in New York, the cost of transportation and housing could easily be more than the tax credit would have generated on a low-budget film like ours. Reluctantly, I accepted that we’d be looking at an all-equity financed film, with the burden of raising all of it resting on my shoulders.

So, pitch deck and preliminary budget in hand, I started approaching producers and potential investors. I’ve already described how the producer search went. As for investors, I was unsurprised that most of my old colleagues who had invested in my earlier ventures took a pass on this one: as a financial matter, the proposition was just very different, and that was reflected in the pitch deck itself, heavy on the aesthetics, light on the business terms. I was pitching an artistic vision, aiming to convince investors that the movie they were financing would make them proud more than that it would make them money. So the people who wound up supporting the film were generally: (1) people of means, with (2) a history of giving substantially to the arts, who (3) knew me well, and (4) were interested enough in this particular project to want to support it. One or two elements from that list weren’t enough: it usually needed to be all of them.

I considered doing a crowd-funding campaign, and wound up not doing that, which I to some degree regret. I didn’t do it primarily because it would have been a lot of work and, even if it proved successful, wouldn’t have wound up making that much of a dent in the budget. The most successful crowdfunding campaigns tap into preexisting affinity groups, either cause-related or genre-related. I couldn’t conceive of such an affinity group to tap into, so I anticipated that I’d mostly be tapping my personal network of friends, reaching down below those who could invest a significant amount of money to those who could give a much smaller amount. I didn’t mind doing that for my second short film, a significant portion of the financing for which came from a crowdfunding campaign, but knowing that even a successful crowdfunding campaign would only add up to roughly the amount that I would be asking from a single investor, I felt weird about doing it. What I don’t think I appreciated sufficiently is the way in which a crowdfunding campaign can be the genesis of a larger effort to build awareness about a film among a larger group of people who may not actually donate. That’s something that might be paying off now that we’re approaching the release date, even if it didn’t make much of a difference to the budget itself.

If you don’t have a production company with a stable of investors behind you, and you don’t have a single angel ready to finance most of your film, and you’re operating at a budget level where crowdfunding isn’t going to make a big dent, then the process of raising money investor by investor is a long, slow slog. But by late October of 2022 we had about half our budget raised, plus we had the first few members of our team (which I’ll discuss in the next post). At this point something happened that gave a new sense of urgency to the endeavor: my father passed away. He had been ill for some time, so his death wasn’t exactly a surprise, but even though it was anticipated the event itself was sudden. Already during shiva, the week-long intense mourning period that follows a Jewish funeral, I found myself thinking about how my father had lived his life, the passion he devoted to his work as a physician and the uncompromising we he pursued his vocation, even when it was transparently suboptimal financially-speaking. For better or worse, he did things his way, because he cared so much about what he did. I realized that the best tribute I could make to him would be to show a similar commitment to something I claimed to care so much about. I had to make the film even if it meant taking a considerably greater financial risk than I had originally planned.

So I became my own angel. I told my team that I was backstopping the rest of the budget. I’d continue to raise money of course, but we were going to make the film regardless of how much I raised. Among other things, this meant we could now make offers to cast that were firm, and that would therefore be taken much more seriously than offers that were contingent on financing.

Now we just had to hope the script was good enough that the actors we made offers to wanted to be in the film.

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Previous entries in this series can be found here:

1. Resentment: The Spark

2. Resentment: From First Draft To Final Draft

If you want to keep up with the countdown to our release, you can follow us on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok and on X.