When filmmakers and studio executives come together there is always a great display of bonhomie.
Hands get shook and backs get slapped. As though they were bound together in their mutual enterprise: the movie business. Perhaps there’s some argy-bargy about profit shares but basically they are on the same page.
Yet the truth is: there is a fundamental disjunct between filmmaker and executive.
It’s not just that one is on salary while the other is eating their savings. Nor is it the power imbalance between them, or the different pathways they have followed to arrive where they are. It’s that one is operating at 30,000 feet and the other is dug in at ground level.
If you’re making a film, it occupies your entire field of view. You can’t see past it. You don’t have time or bandwidth to think about anyone else’s film. You are all in on one thing — the film you are making.
This is true financially too. You have put all your chips down on one square and you can’t take them back. Whereas the studio executive is managing a slate of films. They’ve got chips on 20 squares.
Harvard professor Mihir Desai calls this the core of finance. He starts his book The Wisdom of Finance with a story about chance and pattern. Chance is what the world looks like close up: an arena of luck, accidents, flukes, coincidences, or what the ancients called fortuna.
Whereas pattern is chance viewed over time – statistically. It’s what we notice when we study the world and keep records. It’s the view from 30,000 feet.
‘Finance, ultimately, is a set of tools for understanding how to address a risky, uncertain world’ – Mihir Desai
The study of patterns is what gave us the insurance business (the averaging of bad luck), portfolio theory in finance (strategic diversification) and the studio slate (the search for a hit). These are all methods of managing risk, of taming fortuna.
But our filmmaker has wandered into a casino and bet everything on single spin of the wheel. Their risk is irreducible. They don’t have the luxury of statistics.
So for all the backslapping, the studio executive and the filmmaker are really two different species. Different stakes, different aims, different view of the world.
For our filmmaker, chance is the whole point. The risk is not to be managed but to be taken.
This post is the first in a series I plan to publish based on my reading – the insights I’ve gathered and think worth sharing.
Great article David... No surprise there, 😀
I was script editing for one of Australia's most respected Director / Producers. We attended a gruelling feedback session with a TV network. Their notes ruined a character arc and ruptured the soul of a very cleverly written episode. Afterwards this guy said to me, 'don't ever forget what side of the desk we sit on.' I've never forgotten it. You need both sides of the desk.