Alright, you’ve made it this far. Over the last five columns we’ve covered all of the problems with indie film. Architecture, capital, distribution, audience, and even the filmmaker’s mindset.
You’d probably rather not focus on the problems anymore, but instead are asking, “is there an actual solution here?”
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer in the rest of today’s column. No one can solve all of these problems at once. Instead, what we need is a better operating system – a way of approaching the work such that when you remove obstacles and bottlenecks, the whole system gets better.
If the previous five columns are the symptoms of the current patchwork we call indie film, this one is the diagnosis about how we upgrade it so that it actually works for everyone involved.
Process is not an operating system
Every film school grad can walk you through the different phases of making a movie. Development and packaging, Financing, Production and post, Marketing, Distribution. We’ve had this process for over 100 years and it works — movies are developed, financed, produced, and distributed every day.
What’s missing is the operating layer that connects each phase to outcomes for the filmmaker. Studios (that began as independents escaping the monopoly of the Edison Trust that controlled motion picture patents, cameras, and distribution) and streamers have systematically leveraged their way to extracting all of the upside in the film ecosystem. They now run the system that creates movies. None of this changes the process. What it changes is who captures the value. And the indie producer who doesn’t have their own operating system gets squeezed at every phase.
The independents are not so independent — we still rely heavily on financing, marketing, and distribution from those with enough leverage to do those jobs profitably.
What we need is an “operating layer” that runs across all of the phases of the film’s journey from idea to audience. Process tells you what to do, but it doesn’t tell you how to think about each phase. It doesn’t give you the mindset you need to walk into a financing conversation, or what outcomes you need to define before development starts, or what systems you need during production to ensure the audience shows up.
If process is how you make a movie, the operating layer is how to build a career.
Frameworks, for some of you, are considered a substitute for talent. You equate them with overpaid consultants and faceless MBAs. They are the thing people who can’t actually make movies sell to people who actually make movies.
I disagree. Nolan and Gerwig may not need a framework, but the rest of us do. The framework isn’t a substitute for craft, it’s the operating system underneath it. In an industry where roughly one in 4,000 screenplays leads to a profitable theatrical outcome, my take is that people who don’t need a framework are the outliers. You can’t build a career chasing outliers. The rest of us need to architect the outcomes we want, starting now.
The MOVIE Framework
Three years ago I was writing a business book for creative entrepreneurs called “Blockbuster: How Independent Creators Can Build Massively Profitable Businesses.” It was an end of a chapter in my own career where I was selling off a business I started during the pandemic and transitioning full time to producing movies through my new company, Craftsman Films.
I wanted to write a “framework book”, something a reader could follow, implement, and remember. I knew my framework would start with Mindset, and then defining the Outcome and reverse engineering from there. I realized if I had principles starting with V, I, and E, I could create the MOVIE framework.
(Yes, I’m inordinately excited about the Blockbuster book and the MOVIE framework and being a full-time indie film producer.)
The framework stems from business thinking on purpose. Indie film too often drifts into the “this is the art I want to make” mentality which ignores the realities of the marketplace, and then we wonder (complain) that things aren’t better than they are. What if, instead, we treated indie film as a business with art — the valuable thing we make — at the center, instead of art with a business problem?
Here’s what each part of the framework stands for, and what I’ll be unpacking over the next several columns.
M is for Mindset. Who are you as a filmmaker before you’re anything else? Track one or track two? Hobbyist or career? What are your values and vision? This is the decision upstream of every other decision, and too many filmmakers skip it because it’s uncomfortable to answer honestly. A mentor of mine shared that “Success is 80% mindset, only 20% strategy and skills”, and that’s been very accurate in my own experience.
O is for Outcomes. Reverse engineer from the marketplace realities, not forward engineer from the script. The genre of your movie is an offer, a promise to the viewer. The budget is a function of the outcome you’re chasing, not the other way around. If your projection is three million in box office, you do not get to spend two million on the film.
V is for Visibility. Building the audience before you build the film. We covered the why in column four. The next column I write on Visibility is the how — what high-leverage visibility actually looks like when you stop chasing vanity metrics.
I is for Implement Systems. What gets built once should run forever, like having the editor start on day one of production. The distributor conversation before you start packaging and fundraising. The investor outreach as a system, not a scramble.
E is for Expand Your Impact. Impact is what we all want, but it must be earned. We aren’t entitled to it. You earn it by going through the first four steps of the framework, and then – once you’ve achieved the outcome – you get to start over again with those results under your belt.
Each of these will be a future column. They’re not phases, they’re the operational layer or framework that runs across every phase of the process. They’re also the difference between a filmmaker who finishes one movie and one who builds a sustainable, profitable career.
Not just a framework, a flywheel
Most filmmakers treat every project as a singular event. They write a new script, hire a new crew, find new investors (since the previous ones haven’t been repaid in full yet), new genre which means new audience, new…everything. And they do it every time.
No wonder so many are exhausted!
The MOVIE framework is not a checklist. Implemented and executed fully, it becomes a flywheel. An empowered mindset defines bigger outcomes. Bigger outcomes demand greater visibility. More visibility requires better systems. Better systems expand and increase your impact. Greater impact feeds your empowered mindset, and the cycle continues. Each step naturally pulls you to the next.
Each turn around the flywheel generates greater outcomes with less effort, because the system you built on film one is still serving you on film three, five, ten. That’s what a career in indie film looks like. Not a series of one-off bets, but a flywheel that compounds over time.
I can see it turning and picking up speed in my own work. When I made my first feature, very little was reusable. I wasn’t involved with financing, development, marketing, or distribution. But by the fourth film, the elements I’d been connecting started to work better than before. The first turn happened. It worked. We now have a system for financing, developing, producing, marketing, and distributing films that. while early, is picking up speed and generating bigger and better outcomes with more ease.
But let me be honest about where I am, lest you put me in the same bucket as all the gurus out there online. I’m at the start of turn two, not ten. I have four films under my belt (plus four seasons of television), 4,000 people on my email list, a new indie film studio in Craftsman Films, and a financing vehicle in Producer Fund I. We have the first, flagship film, “Brotherhood – A Cinematic Musical” that just wrapped production and will be in theaters in October.
I need 100,000 people on that list. A 25-times increase in less than six months. The flywheel isn’t up to full speed yet. We have to figure out how to get at least 500,000 people to see our movie in theaters, nearly 10 times more than the last film I produced.
Expanding my impact means being able to fund three to four movies a year at $1 million to $2 million budgets, distribution that reaches at least one million people in the theatrical release, and a slate of projects in development. That’s not theoretical, that’s the work in front of me this week.
The framework isn’t a guarantee. It’s a discipline, something you maintain and optimize every day, rather than wait and see what happens.
The difference between hoping and architecting is the difference between making movies and building a career. And the difference between making a career and building a flywheel is the difference between burning out at year ten and still going at year thirty.
It took 12 years until I was in a place to produce a feature film. Now I’m lining up the next two films in the slate. That’s the power of a flywheel.
Over the next several columns, I’m going deeper on each part of the framework. Mindset. Outcomes. Visibility. Implement systems. Expand your impact.
Which one I tackle first depends on which one you want the most.
So tell me which part of the framework you want first. Tell me which one you think I’m wrong about. Tell me which one is missing from your own career right now.
I read every reply. The next column is yours to shape.
Daren Smith is the founder of Craftsman Films and managing member of Producer Fund I. His current film, “Brotherhood — A Cinematic Musical,” is in post-production for an October 2 theatrical release.
All artwork for the Producer’s Path series is created by Steven de Groot.
