Alex Cox, Macverick filmmaker on film finance
September 11th, 2008 by admin | Tags: noneInteresting review in today’s LA times of Cox’s memoir, “X Films”:
Cox recounts his sales pitch and still cringes, observing the tensions between indie filmmakers and their investors: “People with spare money to invest in film are liable to have issues about their wealth, their parents; whereas independent filmmakers are apt to be political, angry, and scornful of the rich.”
September 13th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
re: “People with spare money to invest in film”
Reality is that the “accredited individual investors” comprise a mere 2.9% of US population and their focus is only 3 industries… (see the rest of the story in PT. 3 of the Due Diligence Blog found on http://www.GlobalCrossroadsCapital.com listed on Nevadafilm.com)
Fact is most films still get invested by either debt capital or institutional equity to include hedge funds or mezzanine-level private equity.
Case in point: The original Star Wars movie almost never was…until 4 investment banks came on board. Today it is a $1B+ franchise.
September 15th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
The issue is, in my mind not the number of investors, or funds, in the US or elsewhere. It is that the overall structure of financing films is little different then it was 95 years ago, when film financing began to be a matter unto itself.
A lot has happened since then, and there is a new generation of filmmakers looking to other means to finance their works then the way their great-grandfathers financed theirs.