Charles Haine - Business and Entrepreneurship for Filmmakers: Making a Living as a Creative Artist in the Film Industry

Business and Entrepreneurship for Filmmakers

This practical guide teaches readers the skills and business acumen required to build a career in the film industry from the ground up.

While countless books and classes teach newcomers the creative aspects of the film industry, many fail to properly prepare readers for the reality of how to navigate a freelance film career today. From creating a business model, dealing with taxes and funding, finding and managing clients, networking, investing, cashflow, and planning for the long-term, Business and Entrepreneurship for Filmmakers provides real-world, pragmatic advice on navigating a freelance film career, whether youre a recent film school graduate looking to take the next step or a seasoned professional hoping to start a production company. Moreover, the skills taught here apply across the industry, from corporate media and commercials to music videos and feature films.

Interviews with filmmakers, innovators, and business experts are included throughout the book to offer further expertise and examples.

Charles Haine is a filmmaker and entrepreneur who has worked in the motion picture industry since 1999. Haine founded the production company Dirty Robber in 2008, which has gone on to success in feature films and shorts, as well as commercials and music videos. Haine is an assistant professor at the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College, and was formerly an associate professor at Los Angeles City College. In 2011, Haine published his first book, The Urban Cyclists Handbook , and currently is the tech editor at NoFilmSchool.com .

Business and
Entrepreneurship for
Filmmakers

Making a Living as a Creative Artist in
the Film Industry

Charles Haine

First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2020 Taylor & Francis

The right of Charles Haine to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Haine, Charles, author.

Title: Business and entrepreneurship for filmmakers : making a living as a creative artist in the film industry / Charles Haine.

Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019020450 | ISBN 9780367140076 (paperback) | ISBN 9780367140069 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429029714 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Motion picturesProduction and direction. | Motion picture industry.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.P7 H345 2020 | DDC 791.4302/32dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020450

ISBN: 978-0-367-14006-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-14007-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-02971-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

Theres an old book, What They Dont Teach You at Harvard Business School by Mark McCormack (Collins, 1984), from a businessperson who set out to tell the real-world lessons they felt were missed in schools. You can think of this book as What they dont teach you at film school, since for some reason many film schools skip teaching the nuts and bolts of business skills that are going to be vital if you want to have a career in the industry.

While there are occasional film business classes that include discussions of the machinations of the large studios, that information is mostly useful 20 years after graduation when youve clawed your way up the ladder. Basically, no one is walking straight out of film school into pitching a studio, and even fewer are getting in that studio pitch session without years of prep first. The realities of what its actually like to walk into the film industry and launch a career from scratch, with no family connections, pre-existing relationships, or massive cash reserve, is almost never discussed anywhere. Maybe people dont want to face how difficult it is to get going in motion pictures. For whatever reason, its seldom talked about.

This is unfortunate since it is honestly easier than ever before to have a career in motion picture creation. We are in the middle of a content explosion and there are tons of jobs for hungry filmmakers looking to climb the ladder in the industry. You just need to accept that film is overwhelmingly a freelance industry and to learn some basic business skills in order to learn to manage your career as a business.

You cant avoid business in film; those stable jobs with regular paychecks where we are protected from the realities of how business operates seldom exist for anyone anymore, but they are especially rare in the world of making films for a living. As a filmmaker youll be a freelancer, and a freelancer is effectively running the business of their own career.

This book is about the business skills vital to survival because so many filmmakers have the hope that there is a way to avoid having to learn all of this, that its distasteful or hard. They dream of being so successful that they wont have to worry about money, cashflow, client acquisition, and all the other nasty parts of business and theyll just have it made. This doesnt exist. Friends of mine have had multi-season arcs on hit soap operas (when that was a thing) and were back to waiting tables after having made it. This is true in all arenas (authors of books you have read, that defined decades, later go on to law school to get a real income after their follow up books fail to attract the same audience), but its especially true in film. Youve got to learn some business skills to survive; no one has ever made it so thoroughly that they dont need to know this stuff.

This is especially true if your parents werent in film, since most people look to their parents for career advice, and film isnt like anything else. If your parents had one of those stable careers (teacher, accountant, parole officer, lawyer, doctor, etc.) that provided the basis for a childhood where we could explore our creative selves and dream of making movies, they might be able to help somewhat, but fundamental aspects of their lives are different from what yours will look like. Thus our parents often cant guide us through navigating a freelance, small business, movie-making life, no matter how much they might want to.

Strangely, its sometimes considered shameful or gauche to talk about money and business with anyone other than our parents, which leaves filmmakers in a conundrum and operating without a lot of good guidance. We need to look outside the traditional areas we go for information to find out how to navigate running a small business, which is what our careers will be.

Its a little bit understandable that film schools dont dive deeply into this; part of the point of film school is avoiding having to think about the reality of the world for a while and dive more deeply into our craft. Thats a wonderful thing, while it lasts, and is vital to the process of finding your actual artistic voice and getting in touch with what it is you want to say outside of the pressures of commerce. Growing as an artist and exploring your muse are much harder to do when you are back to the grind of worrying about payroll. It serves an important function, that period away from commerce, but youll be back in the field eventually and its better to be prepared.