I’m on an airplane out of Burbank post-AFM and as I drift above the clouds at 37,000 feet over the Navajo lands of New Mexico, my memory winds through the craziest work week of my life. “Hollywood is dead” is practically a mantra now. The whinging online has become palpable. But what I saw was a room full of energy and hope.
I did everything defiant to the cynical tact of conventional wisdom for the modern film business. I made the tough decision to change plans in my personal life and go on a few days notice without a single meeting confirmed but a strong need to move some projects. The timing was gripping – I need to get my passion project moving by distributing an important but niche film about the dangers of fascism to cash flow some development costs on the road to financing my next round of production.
I crashed with my buddy Joe up in North Hollywood and made a daily commute down to the Fairmount Plaza making use of the delights of public transport. With the vision limitation, I’m not quite ready to rent a car, and I didn’t want to spend $1200 on Lyfts. By the way, if anyone has ever wondered, Los Angeles is a far more expensive city than New York. That’s a story for another day.
Like any good filmmaker, I have, as Dov Simens puts it, “many projects in various stages of development.” Some filmmakers are great with getting one thing done at a time, but I’ve learned to turn my ADD (I dropped the H with meditation) into a superpower. Conversations I’ve been having for months or years are turning into real opportunities as I’m connecting dots on 5 hours of sleep with no game plan like I’m an air traffic controller a week ago. I left no stone unturned and pulled out projects I had filed away as distant and left others that were supposed to be imminent on ice. I found producers who need directors, directors who need producers, producers with abandoned projects, and business people who want to do business. I ended up pitching projects that didn’t exist a week ago. Most importantly, I had convos with real people who were exhausted with failed pitches and just want to connect on a human level. These were my favorite moments.
The thing that surprised me the most about AFM25 was the mixture of sentiments. Some were disappointed in the offerings, others were cooking. While I had dropped into the Loews in the past, this was my first ~official~ AFM and I found it to be absolutely spectacular. Vegas sounded like a bad idea and Century City worked as a desert island without the distractions of being down by the beach.
It could have gone Lord of the Flies but it ended Breakfast of Champions where I go home to New York City instead of an insane asylum… Before you laugh at that allegory, hold your horses. BILLIONS of dollars of new stages are being built across the boroughs and into the tri-state. It might not be obvious to the cynics, but abstract thinking makes a poor lunch for nihilism. More on this in a moment.
When I’m not directing a project, I automatically fall back into being an entrepreneur. I didn’t come up through film finance – I came up through production and went to business school to learn how the world we live in ticks. I find the film finance world to actually be extremely quirky and interesting. There are many wild opinions flying around that would make any asset manager tilt their head. The biggest being that films are suddenly impossible to get financed.
I’m going to just say this out loud – no business is hard to finance if you can prove how an investor is going to recoup their money and make a nice profit using real world financial metrics, good contracts, and GAAP. If you can’t do that, you’re not in the right role. This isn’t a finance issue. It’s a sales issue. I was there when SAP said they were going to revolutionize the world with Big Data and SaaS. Did Los Angeles get more fun or less fun?
I feel like the film business is made of pragmatists, dreamers, and cynics and it’s time for the cynics to chill the hell out. Instead of bending a knee so the dreamers and the pragmatists can work, the cynics are staring into the bottom of a long empty glass. The new way of doing things with data and streams and social media barely works from a sustainability point of view. If there’s anything that 2025 has taught me it’s that soft skills of identifying energy vampires who don’t care about the art behind the commerce are the first ones to go in the social culling. And my reality is that I love a good cynic. I actually find them hilarious. But a room full of them? I just wish the cynics would talk to the pragmatists for the artists so some great films get made. Maybe then the desert island will be a little less Cast Away.
Sorry I left my suit in your closet, Joe. With the way things are going in LA, I’m going to need to fly back and put it on sooner rather than later.
