Hello From the Other Side

Three snapshots from independent film’s nonprofit ecosystem reveal how philanthropic capital is quietly reshaping arthouse theaters, grant-funded productions, and distribution

The author (far right) with friends outside of SF’s Roxie Theater in 2021.

I’ve had a professional life in film for 12 years and have lived in Los Angeles for almost a quarter of that—yet Hollywood still feels like a foreign country. On paper, I engage in the same activities as The Industry: we both finance, produce, distribute, and exhibit movies. I consume a reasonable bit of movie industry content, as I’m sure you do, too. I follow The Town, the Penske trades, and the WBD-Paramount merger closely and find it infinitely fascinating. I am deeply concerned about the ramifications of corporate consolidation on culture, the economy, and our democracy.

My film career has centered on cinematic nonfiction, a grant making role as an executive producer, and being a trustee of a nonprofit arthouse cinema. Let’s just say my taste and “the market’s” don’t always overlap, so I’ve had limited exposure to the Hollywood studios, distributors, agents, and mega-corporations that dominate the news cycle. I’m not the only one. We moved on years ago, or were never a part of it in the first place.

This time of unprecedented corporate disruption begs the question: Are we operating in some version of the Other Side of the Collapse of Big Hollywood? I see evidence of activity already happening on the Other Side in many parts of independent film.

The following three examples from the Other Side are also, at root, philanthropy stories that may tell us something we can’t quite say out loud yet. They are top of my mind, and since my descriptions only scratch the surface, they are not intended to argue how things should or shouldn’t be. In the face of a shrinking market-base industry, the nonprofit cinema ecosystem may be poised to grow.

I’ve selected examples from different sectors, so they might loosely sketch some implications of philanthropic capital flowing into independent film. As in other fields, there isn’t enough philanthropy to “save” indie film, but can it play a constructive role in moving towards a new market-based future? My goal is to illustrate what people and organizations are already doing while Big Hollywood works out its future.

Community-Centered Cinema: The Roxie Theater, San Francisco

The Roxie is the oldest purpose-built cinema in San Francisco. Over its 100+ years on 16th Street in the Mission District, it has seen a number of lives. For a significant part of its history teetered on the brink of financial ruin. In 2009, a dedicated group of film lovers made a bet that establishing The Roxie as a nonprofit would finally break the cycle of financial precarity and secure its future. Seventeen years on, the theater is stronger than ever, a vital contributor to a vibrant movie culture in San Francisco.

Becoming a nonprofit immediately unlocked the potential for angel philanthropy—infusions of donated funds that could provide breathing room to pivot the business model. I think it’s important to surface “survival” donations by generous individuals because they happen more often than we realize. Is it a feature or a flaw in the design? Both. On one hand, it’s less than ideal to get to a point where a gift like this is necessary and you certainly can’t build a business plan around it; on the other, no-strings-attached vote-of-confidence support is an unparalleled gift that can get an organization through a crisis, and the tax deduction in exchange can be just the incentive a donor needs to make a big move.

Putting mission over profit wasn’t just a crafty way to earn tax-deductible donations to conduct business as usual; it provided the theater’s leadership the chance to grow a vision for the kind of community participant it could be and build programming and partnerships accordingly.

In the last 10 years, the theater has launched a number of initiatives in response to community interests: RoxieCine, a year-round Spanish language programming series; OUTlook, a year-round LGBTQ+ programming series; and Roxie Review, an affordable rentals program for filmmakers to quality-check their films and host feedback screenings. Programming deeply attuned to local interests—drawing on a rich repertory tradition as well as new releases rather than solely relying on what comes out of Hollywood each year—fills the seats and sells the popcorn.

I could go on about The Roxie, but I’ll close with a final illustration: the board of directors. I’m perhaps biased, as my term as board co-chair wrapped up at the end of March. Often nonprofits are dragged down by ineffective and sometimes downright counterproductive board behavior. But when a board is communicating and leading effectively, organizational strength follows.

I had the great honor to serve on The Roxie’s board while the theater made the bold step to launch a three-year, $7M capital campaign to raise sufficient funds to purchase its building and pay for the necessary upgrades, programming, and staff compensation to ensure a long and healthy future. The community, staff, and board rallied so enthusiastically around this effort that we wrapped up the campaign a year ahead of schedule, closed escrow last May, and unveiled a first round of tech upgrades last week.

Large, medium, and even small theater chains are facing an existential crisis. Meanwhile, microcinemas seem to be popping up all over the place and I suspect The Roxie is not the only indie arthouse thriving in this moment. Are we heading towards a “smaller is better” future? The answer may be inseparable from the nonprofit model that made it possible.

Soft Money Sundance Grand Jury Award Winner: To Hold A Mountain

Grant financing is a path more commonly used in documentary than scripted films. For nonfiction, there’s frankly a consistent lack of viable market-based alternatives, and a stronger “public good” case can be made.

One example that caught my attention at Sundance this year was the World Documentary winner To Hold A Mountain. I was fortunate to attend the world premiere and was so moved by the film’s beauty, heart, and intimacy. What caught my eye in addition to the stunning filmmaking was the collection of North American funders in both the audience and the end credits. It’s the first Points North Diane Weyerman Fellowship film to premiere; it also has support from Chicken & Egg Films, InMaat Foundation, Catapult Film Fund, Meadow Fund, Doc Society, and IDA. Perhaps even more.

During the post-screening Q&A, co-director Biljana Tutorov offered a fascinating window into how a film team based in Serbia came to seek U.S.-based support for their project. According to her, in her country, people can be sabotaged by an accusation of “taking Russian money.” So the filmmakers figured a good way to escape this accusation would be to have American money back their production. Biljana heard about Chicken & Egg at a European film festival some years before, so she was aware of U.S. film support funds, and started applying.

By the time of the Sundance premiere, the political cover from this support proved just as valuable as the grants, mentorship, and connections their U.S.-based EPs provided in the four or so years since the film landed on American funder radars.

To Hold A Mountain continues its festival tour, so this is a story unfolding in real time. I’m curious to see how its journey continues as it screens at more festivals globally. What happens next—how it reaches audiences beyond the circuit, and who pays for that—will be another data point in the ongoing question of what philanthropic capital in film buys.

Philanthropy Enters the Distribution Space: Impact Campaigns

I attended my first Sundance in 2015, smack in the heyday of the streamer acquisition bonanza. This really warped my perception of independent film sales, and I regret that I don’t have lived experience in the Before Times because those who do have a much more sophisticated understanding of the challenges we face in distribution today. My overly-simplistic understanding is that, back then, distribution was where filmmakers made their revenue by exploiting territories and rights to specific markets such as educational and broadcast. This revenue mix has been hollowed out by Big Tech and global streamers, so here we are—yet again—building pathways to audiences that bypass the big corporate players entirely. And trying to figure out how to make it work financially.

One of those alternative pathways is the “impact campaign,” a version of distribution that layers a set of social, legislative, or cultural change goals on top of traditional measures such as box office and viewership. How one measures the effectiveness of film campaigns towards those goals is an ongoing conversation; just like in philanthropy at large, assigning attributive success to any single intervention feels like a category error. But the impact campaign budgets have to come from somewhere. I don’t have the data to prove it, but my hunch is that the majority have been raised via grants (both institutional and individual). Philanthropy has, in this way, quietly entered the film distribution game.

Over here on the Other Side, we’re asking ourselves what the role of philanthropy in distribution ought to be. Should it pay as much as possible—even the whole kit and kaboodle? Does this goal stand in conflict with the desire to return to a time when market-based distribution presents a viable path? Or can we have both?

Philanthropy is also being deployed as risk capital, funding distribution experiments that can help us try ideas that the market currently won’t support: Distribution Advocates (who are publishing this piece), Ford Foundation, Perspective Fund, Color Congress are all currently running such programs. What are we learning from these initiatives? What will it take to convert these experiments into market-supported businesses?

Looking Ahead

Collapse isn’t just a feature of Big Hollywood. The shuttering of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and rescission of federal funding for public media represent existential threats for U.S. independent documentary—threats that philanthropy alone cannot absorb. There is as much uncertainty about the future of public media as there is about the future of Hollywood after a studio mega-merger. The three snapshots above share an underlying logic: each of them has a strong “public good” case that enables them to add philanthropic support to their revenue mix.

But challenges remain on the Other Side, too: significantly greater demand for grant funding than supply, lack of sustainable career pathways for filmmakers, and the power dynamics and administrative burdens of the Philanthropic Industrial Complex, to name a few. There are still many assumptions left to question. Have we already accepted that the nonprofit cinema ecosystem is the solution to a shrinking market-based industry—and is that what we even want?

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This guest post was originally published on Distribution Advocates. Thanks to JustFilms | Ford Foundation, Perspective Fund, and Linlay Productions for supporting our activities.