Distribution Advocates Presents: The Truth About Film School (Episode 4)

Why is distribution almost completely absent from film school curriculums?

Why is distribution almost completely absent from film school curriculums? Host Avril Speaks delves into this discrepancy and looks at the real-world consequences for filmmakers. This episode features conversations with

Jameka Autry

,

Barbara Twist

, Alece Oxendine, and Pat Murphy.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Avril Speaks:

I do want to ask you just the pointed question, do you think film school is a scam?

Jameka Autry:

Okay. Are we asking? Are we going there? Is this the question?

Avril Speaks:

Yeah, that’s my question. Do you think film school is a scam?

Jameka Autry:

I don’t think it’s a scam. I do think that it is overpriced for the actual value on the other side. In a lot of jobs and a lot of positions, you’re not going to be making a significant amount of money. You really have to weigh the pros and cons of if film school is going to be worth it, meaning am I in a position to take on a quarter of a million dollars worth of debt? And that’s a lot of money. It’s a lot of money to think about paying something back. I don’t think it’s a scam. I do think that you can learn really valuable skills, but is it overpriced? Absolutely. So here’s my story.

Avril Speaks:

Hello out there and welcome to Distribution Advocates Presents. I am your host, Avril Speaks, producer, filmmaker, and co-founder of Distribution Advocates. Our team has commissioned this series of conversations where we delve into concerns about the current landscape of independent film distribution. We’ll chat with folks who are navigating these spaces, debunk some outdated myths, and look to innovative, sustainable, and equitable solutions for distributing films to their waiting audiences.

In this episode, we’ll amble through the hallowed and expensive halls of film school as we dissect its function and value in the current industry of distribution. I’ll be joined by filmmaker-turned-professor Jameka Autry. We’ll also hear from Columbia Film School’s Industry Outreach Director Alece Oxendine, and filmmaker Pat Murphy, who attended NYU Tisch.

Thank you so much for doing this. Why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience?

Jameka Autry:

Sure. My name is Jameka Autry. I am a producer, filmmaker, investigative storyteller. I am a professor at Columbia University. All of those things.

Avril Speaks:

How long have you been teaching at Columbia?

Jameka Autry:

I first started teaching in the fall of 2020.

Avril Speaks:

You came into this experience having had experience in the field as a producer. Talk a little bit about your experience as a producer and what you were doing before you went into the classroom as an educator.

Jameka Autry:

Absolutely. By training, I was a photographer. I decided I wanted to go into business for myself. I was doing a lot of photojournalism, and so I went to Duke and they had a Center for Documentary Studies program. I started off on the photography side and there was a class that I took with Elisabeth Haviland James, and she was an amazing producer. She did The Loving Story (2011), and I just fell in love with filmmaking from taking her class. So I started over my program at Duke. Duke Center for Documentary Studies when I was there was not an accredited MFA program. There was only a certificate program, and so it was exponentially cheaper than it is now. I went and pursued a certificate, and then I moved to New York after I finished that program and ended up working for almost five years with Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, who are two amazing producers.

But I got my start really working on the post-production side first, which I think is different from most producers. They usually go from a production assistant to an associate producer to then producer, and I started opposite of that. I was an assistant editor and then I went to an associate producer, and then a co-producer and then a producer. Did a ton of all the non-glamorous things such as clearances, post-production supervising. I was really in the weeds on a lot of the technical things, which at first, I think I was really upset about, but it was the best training ground possible because it made me a better producer on the front side.

I worked with Ricki and Annie for about five years, then I went to Cinereach, worked with their original productions team, which was also a wonderful experience. I learned a lot about the industry, but from a different side, learned more about the business and that prepared me to actually go out and become an independent producer.

Avril Speaks:

I love your story about how you got started coming up through post, because sometimes, I feel when we talk about producing, we don’t even talk about the opportunities there. That’s a whole other skill set.

Jameka Autry:

There is, I think now, more of a place to specialize in your specific field of producing, and I think it’s a better place to start than just saying upon graduation, “I’m an independent producer,” and hanging out a shingle and being expected to do every single thing and every single job, which we know is an immense list for independent producers. And sometimes it’s better to start in the skill set where you can really grasp and make an impact.

So I had been independently producing for about three to four years when I had an opportunity to go to Berkeley. I did a fellowship at UC Berkeley at their Investigative Reporting Program, which for me, was just building another skill set in the investigative reporting realm. The fellowship at Berkeley was amazing. It was a, quote unquote, job, so I was a salaried employee of the university but also had the opportunity to audit classes, learn from amazing investigative journalists, although it was only for one year instead of their traditional two-year program. So that’s how I was able to make it work for me. That’s a film school hack.

Jemma Desai:

I didn’t come through film school, but I did come to it through a love of watching films, watching Parajanov films, every single Pasolini film. Really, that was my film school.

Barbara Twist:

I went to film school for undergrad. I studied film studies with also some film production. I’m a big believer in knowing what’s come before you so that you’re better informed. It gives you an opportunity to explore and see what’s out there.

Avril Speaks:

A good friend of mine that I went to school with is always like, “I demand a refund. They need to refund me my money.”

Pat Murphy:

I think film schools should orient more towards the business side of filmmaking.

Avril Speaks:

So stepping into the world of academia, once you started teaching, what were you starting to see? What were some of the first things you started to notice in terms of those differences between your real lived experience versus the classroom teaching experience of teaching film, or documentary film in particular?

Jameka Autry:

When I got the job at Columbia, I asked really specifically, “What are my thresholds? What can I teach? What can I not teach?” And they said, “Well, really, it’s up to you. We really trust you in this role,” and they let me build the program or my class structure in the way that I thought it should run, which was great. Duke really teaches you how to be a one-man-band-type filmmaker. It doesn’t teach you anything about the business. That part was something that I still had to really learn when I came to New York.

In the real world, you’re working in teams. There’s always a collaboration. You have a lot of voices and opinions that you have to navigate, but everything is done in a team structure. The one-man-band setup is great to learn those technical skills about “how do I run camera at the same time I’m running sound,” and “how do I actually learn to edit?” It really gave me a foundation for some of those things, but it’s not at all like the actual industry.

Avril Speaks:

I would love to know, just from your class, what are some things that you’ve implemented to try and bridge this gap?

Jameka Autry:

It’s hard because I think in a classroom setting, you are in a position where you’re still getting to know the students and they have a structured program that they go through. Columbia’s program is three years, even for producing students. But I really, really focus on the fact that you have to know who you are as a producer before you’re actually going to be really good to anyone else, and so figuring out what you don’t like is as important as figuring out what you do like. Because we know that “producer” is no longer like a one-size-fits-all. There’s different specialties within the producing field. Some people are line producers, some people are creative producers, some people just work on distribution, so it really just depends on where your skill set lies, and I focus a lot with the students on trying to figure out, what do you not like? Because if you know what you don’t like, you can figure out what you do like.

And just through some of these practices and walking them through the steps of making a budget, making a treatment, working on a pitch deck, I figure out, okay, you’re really good at writing, you’re not great at visuals, or you’re really great at numbers. Do you like the numbers? One of the things that I do in my class and the way it’s structured is that we talk about money and financing. I give the students a very, very accurate picture of what the industry is and how to navigate it, meaning that it’s not a lot of theory and “let’s study film.” It’s really the basics about producing. It’s how do you write a treatment? What are some of the things you look for in legal conversations? How do you put together a distribution deal?

And again, a lot of this is classroom discussion and not real life, but I wanted to mirror it and make the class as close to real life as possible. Because I think this industry is really full of smoke and mirrors, especially on the unscripted side. There’s so much independent wealth that’s floating around in these spaces. You’re working alongside people who have trust funds or who have a wealthy spouse, and they don’t have to actually worry about the paying of the bills on a monthly basis. They’re just doing this for the passion, but that’s not most people’s journey. I think a lot of people that are working below the line are people that need the paycheck.

Really dispelling some of those myths is also important, and you have to be committed in the classroom to telling that story. You have to be committed to telling the story of when you graduate, you are probably going to be making no money for a really long time. What does that look like? How do you navigate that? How do you get your first job? And so I’m really focused on some of the skill sets that people have so that they can actually go out and apply for a job.

Avril Speaks:

So let’s talk about some illusions of grandeur, especially as it relates to the myth of film school. I laugh because in Distribution Advocates, we often talk about filmmakers having a plan for their film, and oftentimes, people are just like, “Oh yeah, my plan is to premiere at Sundance and then get a deal with A24, and then just become famous.” The question we’ve been asking at Distribution Advocates is does film school help perpetuate that idea and also everything that comes along with that idea? Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of that myth?

Jameka Autry:

Yeah, it’s a really dangerous myth that I think has been sold, and I don’t know where it comes from exactly. I think of Spike Lee being discovered out of NYU and becoming this overnight phenomenon. That was a very, very, very different time and I think that that time has passed. I don’t think that that is at all the landscape that is out there anymore.

Avril Speaks:

Similar sentiments were also shared by Alece Oxendine and Pat Murphy when I sat down with them.

Alece Oxendine:

My name is Alece Oxendine. I’m the Director of Industry and Festival Outreach for Columbia University’s film program. 15 years ago, you could be an auteur. If you went to film school 15 years ago and you’re making films and you’re doing what you have to do, you can be an auteur. You cannot be an auteur right now. Right now, you have to be an entrepreneur and there’s no way of getting around that. When I say entrepreneur versus auteur, I feel like an auteur can create in a vacuum and there’s people that support that auteur, and they tend to be mostly men unfortunately. They have the privilege, I should say, of creating in the vacuum and just being in their own esoteric world that is an anomaly and not the norm. We need to be paying attention to distribution. You need to learn about it, you need to know about it.

Avril Speaks:

And so you’ve had some experience with producer and professor, Michelle Materre. She was someone who did make it a point to educate filmmakers about distribution while she was here, and her class in film distribution at the New School was very well known and lauded, from what I understand.

Alece Oxendine:

Michelle was a formidable voice when it came to distribution. One of the few classes I’ve ever heard of about distribution, I actually begged her for a syllabus, so I have one of her syllabus on distribution somewhere floating around on my Google Docs. I would see her talking to an echo chamber or see her talking into empty spaces, yelling, “Hey, y’all.” I know how challenging it was for her to make sure she had a voice in distribution, and that’s been what my crusade is. We are living in a different world than we’ve ever had before in the industry, and this is coming from someone who studied the historiography of cinema. We need to be paying attention to distribution. Know about it, learn about it, be respected in the space of distribution, and she was the first person I learned this from.

Avril Speaks:

As someone who went to film school and also as someone who’s a former professor, I used to teach everything from pre-production through post. I’ve never taught a distribution class. I know that there are some schools that have them here and there, but it’s rare.

Pat Murphy:

My name is Pat Murphy. I’m a documentary editor and director and producer. I definitely don’t want to say that I regret my NYU film school education whatsoever. I’m very grateful and lucky to have been able to have that experience. I learned a ton about the craft of filmmaking and documentary filmmaking specifically at Tisch. Professors there ended up being some of my first jobs out of the industry. NYU did not teach anything about the business of film, about marketing or distribution certainly. You do have to question this kind of system. While I learned a ton about the craft, they did not really prepare me for the real world.

Avril Speaks:

I went to Columbia and I also used to teach film at a couple of different colleges, and I so value education. I loved teaching, but in retrospect, what type of education were we pushing? Now that I’m no longer teaching and I’m full throttle as an independent filmmaker, it’s something that I think about a lot, but it’s rare that you touch on that side of things in terms of what happens to your film after you’ve made it? Jameka, I’m wondering if you have any insight or any thoughts on that in terms of why that is and why film school is set up that way, that it’s very much on practice and very little on business?

Jameka Autry:

I think there’s a disconnect. A lot of it is systemic and also political. I think that you have a mismatch of systems in a way. I think that adjunct professors are the ones who are able to actually go out and have the time to still navigate and work a lot of times in the industry, so they’re seeing these things firsthand. Whereas, tenured professors who are there and teaching full time, their access to the actual industry is a little bit more limited. They might be learning from their colleagues who are out in the field, but I don’t think that they actually are on the front lines anymore.

So they’re teaching practice, meaning they’re teaching things that are technical in nature, things that are going to be stable and usually never change, but the business around is changing and there’s not a lot of actual business courses. And when they are, I think you see them taught by adjuncts who are actually out in the business in a more real way and can actually report back and bring back that information. But adjuncts are in a place where they’re being paid very low wages for teaching a class, and so you still have this system of taking and extracting, and not actually giving back to those sources that are actually pouring into the system.

Avril Speaks:

You mentioned a lot of adjuncts, they’re just coming in for that class so they’re not necessarily ingrained in the day-to-day of that program and of the students, and just what that means in terms of the overall structure of the program. I think the other thing too is having schools that will support tenured professors in making work. I’ve experienced at times that not every program supports professors taking a semester to go and make a film, you know what I’m saying? It’s really also a matter of that program supporting those professors getting that kind of real world experience, so I think that’s an issue as well.

Jameka Autry:

I’m a huge advocate for anyone having to go back in the field and relearn their skills. I don’t care if you’re a professor. I actually think that industry execs who are making a lot of decisions also need to go back into the field. It’s funny because a lot of them unfortunately have never sometimes been in the field, but I think even if you started off there, you need to go back every 10 years and maybe re-up. I think that when you’re not out in the field, it’s really easy to make a lot of decisions that impact people in really specific ways, and if you don’t have that understanding, if you don’t have that skill set, if you don’t have that training, you’re making decisions that really are out of your place, out of your bounds.

Avril Speaks:

The industry changes so fast, even in terms of distribution. What works today is not what people were doing even three years ago. Even before the pandemic, things were different than they are now. You have to be in it in order to know and to understand what’s trending. Also, let’s be real. This is kind of a closed door industry.

Jameka Autry:

The level of nepotism in this industry is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and I think there’s different degrees of nepotism. I will say that I got my first big job because the person who was interviewing had gone to Duke, so there was a name recognition and that’s how I got my foot in the door. But I’ve also seen a lot of production studios where someone will say, “I was also a graduate of XYZ College and I’m looking for a job, and do you have a job?” And I can’t tell you how many interns or production assistants that I had to teach the basics. There was no skill set there.

Avril Speaks:

It’s so funny, when I graduated from Columbia, Michael Moore spoke at our graduation and his whole speech was basically like, “You’ve just wasted your money.”

Jameka Autry:

Oh, no. That was the graduation speech? You wasted your money?

Avril Speaks:

That was our graduation speech. I mean, it was essentially like, “You spent all this money and now you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to pay it back, working for corporate America to try and pay this money back.” And essentially, his graduation speech was, you just spent, in my case, six years in a scam.

Jameka Autry:

So as someone who has gone through the Ivy League system, you feel that it is a scam.

Avril Speaks:

It’s a very heavy term.

For a long time, I really felt like I had wasted money and time because first of all, that program broke my soul. It’s okay, I got it back, but I came out of it broken mentally, spiritually, in many ways. So for a long time, I felt like this was such a waste. I didn’t really understand the value of it until I started teaching. I realized, particularly Columbia because they’re so story focused, it’s a very story-heavy program, and I started to understand the importance of story, and I still feel that way. That’s something I’ve been able to carry with me as a producer, as an exec. Basically in every arena of my career, I’m understanding how important story is and how helpful that time was to really understand what that is and what that looks like and how to build the story. Now, did I need to put myself into this kind of debt in order to learn that? I don’t know. That’s a question I can’t answer.

Scam is a heavy word, but I do really think that it’s a structure that needs to be looked at on both ends, from a student perspective in terms of students going into film programs, but also on the administrator end. As professors, as admins who are running film schools, I think that there needs to be some work on what is the narrative about the film industry that we’re perpetuating and that we’re giving the students. They’re coming out of these programs with certain expectations about how their career is going to go and how they’re going to get there that I think are unrealistic.

And I get asked a lot, would you recommend film school? I love teaching and so I placed a lot of value on education, but in retrospect, in thinking about what type of education we were pushing or we were teaching, even as a professor, it’s something that’s really worth taking a look at, both from a film school perspective and also from the perspective as filmmakers who are looking to make our work.

So Alece, I’m curious from your perspective, whether or not filmmakers choose to attend film school or not, what do you believe they need to know about the business of film, specifically as it relates to distribution?

Alece Oxendine:

When filmmakers go and they’re talking to the distributor or they’re talking to—whether a financier or anybody along in the process—the more you understand your audience, the better. It makes that distribution process easier, because that’s distribution. I think people miss what the definition is, and that’s how people get confused and scared. When they hear distribution, they’re like, “It’s money, and I didn’t want to work in finance. I’m a filmmaker. I don’t know anything about finance. I don’t know what I’m doing. I get really scared.” And I said, “Actually, it is just you connecting with your audience.” Think of distribution being that way, and it kind of demystifies everything and it makes it a lot easier for you to approach distribution. It’s like, no, it’s just connecting with my audience. I know who my audience is. So when you talk to a distributor, you talk to a sales agent, you talk to anybody, you say, “Here’s my audience. Can you reach this audience?” It’s an important question to ask when you’re talking to distributors and you’re talking about distribution. “Can you reach this audience?” The first question you ask.

Avril Speaks:

So we’ve heard here some useful tools that can be gained by going to film school, but there are also real flaws with the current model. Film school tends to focus on the creative. Not even every film school teaches business, period. It’s like an ongoing conversation that I feel like I’m always having. Whenever I do panels, you have to stress, this is the film business. It’s a business. And I think a lot of times when people see the stars walking the red carpet and stuff, people think that that’s all that film is, and they’re just like, “Oh, I just want to be a part of it. I want to be a part of that.” Or, “I have a story to tell and I want to learn how to tell that story.” So when you go to film school and when people create film schools, when they create these departments, you’re teaching people how to tell stories.

But the problem I think that we have in the industry is that this thing of telling stories and this thing of a business, they don’t always match up. I do think that there needs to be some restructuring of graduate film school. It’s an MFA, which is a master of fine art, but filmmaking is a business. It hasn’t been a fine art for a while, and so I think that there needs to be a restructuring that looks at the film school experience in that light, as a business in terms of what are you creating and also what are you thinking about in terms of audience and how does that connect with the market that’s in place today? But I also think if that’s going to be the case, there has to be the support for students and for faculty to make it a program of practice.

You have professors in here who are very knowledgeable in their craft. Why aren’t the professors out making movies and bringing the students in on that filmmaking process? Kind of like shadowing or like an apprenticeship type of situation. That had always been my dream of how to do this whole thing of teaching, of teaching film school, is making the practice of it be incorporated into the curriculum. How about we make a film from soup to nuts, from beginning to end, and really see what that process is like putting a film together, financing it. Yes, making it, but it’s financing it. It’s finding the audience, distributing it, exhibiting it, and letting students see the entire process of that.

That’s all for this episode of Distribution Advocates Presents. Tune in for other series installments discussing the landscapes of film festivals, distribution, sales agents, awards, and exhibition. This episode is produced by Moso Haus. Our producer is Nacey Watson Johnson. Our supervising producer is Ivana Tucker, and our production manager is Samiah Adams. Sound design is by Emily Crain. Special thanks to the team at Distribution Advocates, Abby Sun, Carlos Gutierrez, Karin Chien, Amy Hobby, and Kelly Thomas, as well as this episode’s guests, Pat Murphy, Jameka Autry, Alece Oxendine, Jemma Desai, and Barbara Twist. And of course, a heartfelt thank you to our funders, Ford Foundation, Prospective Fund, and Color Congress. Until next time, I’m your host, Avril Speaks, signing off.