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August 20, 2025 27 mins
 In this solo episode, Jeff Deverett unpacks a bold but honest take: the indie film business isn’t broken—because it’s never truly worked in the first place. Jeff dives deep into why indie filmmakers often fail to build sustainable careers, focusing on one crucial oversight: ignoring the business side of filmmaking.

 Key takeaways:● The difference between indie filmmaking and the indie film business● Why treating filmmaking purely as art is unsustainable● The essential role of marketing, distribution, and finance● How big studios succeed by balancing creativity and business strategy● Why indie filmmakers need to build teams with complementary skill sets● Practical advice for aligning with business-minded collaborators

 Whether you're a student, first-time filmmaker, or seasoned creative, this episode is packed with valuable insights on how to survive.—and thrive—as a career indie filmmaker.
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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Many people say that the Indie film business is broken.
I say something can't be broken unless it was actually
working to begin with. The Indie film business has actually
never been working properly. In today's episode, I'm going to
explain why if you want to be a successful Indie filmmaker,
you need to know a lot about not just the

(00:21):
production of movies, but the business. We are going to
tell you the truth and reality of what really happens
in the Indie film business. So notice that I said
in the intro I called it the Indie film business.
I didn't say indie filmmaking. There is a big difference

(00:42):
between indie filmmaking and the Indie film business, and that
is the disconnect in this industry. In Indie filmmaking, see,
most indie filmmakers are basically artists and they're not really
interested in the business side of the film business. They
always say to me, oh, somebody else take care of that.
You know, you want to produce a film. I don't

(01:02):
run numbers, I don't do spreadsheets. I don't do this.
I make. I'm an artist. I do creative stuff. I'm
the filmmaker. I make the art, and I say that's wonderful.
Except there's a reason we call it the indie film
business because there's the film part, which is the artistic
side of it, but then there's the business part, which
is all the other stuff that has to happen in

(01:23):
order for the art to happen. In other words, there
has to be money, there has to be sales distribution.
There's lots of components that have to happen for a
business to be functional, to run properly, and to be sustainable.
So people say the indie film business is broken, and
I say, no, no, no, no, that's not true. The

(01:44):
indie film business has never actually been working for the
reason that I just explained that indie filmmakers don't like
to do the business part. So let me just take
a minute and compare it to this big budget Hollywood filmmaking.
Let's call it the studio business, all right. So stud
and streamers the big companies. For the most part, these
are public companies, and public companies have a responsibility to

(02:06):
report to shareholders and earn a profit hopefully, all right,
that is the point of the business. Those are businesses.
They started off shirt people were making films, but ultimately
the reason they still exist and the reason that they're
so big is because they're designed to generate a profit
for their shareholders what we call return on investment. So

(02:28):
people are willing to invest these in these businesses because
they hope to get their money back and an additional
profit return on investment. So the mentality of the entire
structure of these organizations is motivated on profit. Right, is
to run a successful business. Now, the business they happen
to be running manufactures a product. The product happens to

(02:50):
be entertainment feature films, television shows, other forms you know, sportscasts, news,
all this kind of stuff. When you're a big vertically
integrated company, their business is to provide good quality entertainment
to audiences. But notice I say they're businesses, right, so
only one component of that business actually does the entertainment, like,

(03:12):
creates the entertainment. It's a very important component because if
you create crappy entertainment, nobody's going to want to consume
your product. Like, audiences don't want to watch bad movies
and TV shows. They want to watch good quality stuff.
So it's very important that that side of the business,
the creation side, makes good quality product. That's the filmmaking side,

(03:33):
but that can't exist on its own in a vacuum.
On the flip side of that, you have to have
the business components which basically monetize the good filmmaking. Basically,
what that means is we need to have a distribution
and marketing system on the other side, so that when
these good pieces of entertainment get made, they are put

(03:54):
in front of audiences who can consume them, i e.
Watch them, enjoy them, and hold hopefully pay for them.
That is where the revenue comes from and hopefully the profit.
So if it was just about making the product and
not getting it out to the audiences, these businesses would
fail miserably. Why because audiences would know about the products.

(04:14):
So basically, as you know, I talk a lot about
distribution and marketing, that is the distribution of marketing side
of the business. It's basically putting the good quality product
that you create in front of audiences, enticing them to
be excited to want to watch the product, and hopefully
paying for the product when they consume at Ie watch it.

(04:35):
That's the business side. Without that business side, the film
side could not possibly exist. I mean, it's just that's
the disconnect. Basically, in the indie film business. See in
the studio side, there would never be a production department
without a distribution of marketing department. And by the way,
the distribution of marketing department, because it generates sales and revenue,

(04:58):
makes it much easier for them front end, which is
the finance department, to raise the money from shareholders and
or private investors or whoever they get the money from
and the revenue that they earn in order to fund
the creation of the product. So the distribution of marketing
is the core element that generates sort of the excitement,

(05:19):
the story, the narrative, and the money to do the financing,
and the financing is what supports the creation of the product.
You take this piece of the pie out of the
equation and the whole thing comes tumbling down. There's no
business I haven't yet seen in my life a business
that doesn't involve sales. Everybody, whether it's a service or

(05:40):
product or whatever, everybody is selling something because sales is
what generates revenue, and revenue is what drives business, all right.
So everybody's selling something Like you're a surgeon, you're selling
surgery services. You're lawyer is selling lawyer services, all right,
you're a product company, your Amazon, You're selling delivery of

(06:02):
goods and products. Everybody's selling something. The film business is
no different. We're selling entertainment to audiences. So our customer
base in the film industry is called an audience. Sometimes
they call them consumers and other industries or customers whatever,
we call it audience. Those are the people who watch

(06:22):
our product, which is consuming the product and ultimately hopefully
pay in one form or another, all right, and generate
the revenue. So this whole thing is driven by distribution
of marketing. Every business is driven by distribution of marketing.
Sometimes I talk about a simple sort of business. I
got coffee shop. You want to run a coffee shop.
You could be Starbucks and be a huge national chain

(06:44):
and have thousands of locations and be a public company
and everything like that. Or you could be a one off,
individual boutique, single coffee shop. So in order to be
successful in either business model, a couple things have to happen.
Number One, you need to make good coffee, all right.
If you don't make good coffee, then ultimately your customers
are not going to want to consume your product because

(07:05):
nobody wants to drink bad coffee, all right, So it's
got to be at least decent, all right. Number two,
you have to make people aware that you make good coffee.
So that's a combination of basically it's marketing more so.
So I was going to say a combination of things
like a good location so it's accessible to your audiences.
So in the film business, we would maybe call that

(07:27):
distribution right putting it in front of the people. So
being in the right location, say on the right street
corner or the right drive through, whatever it is that takes,
allows people to actually come and access your coffee. Because
if you're in some valley where people it's uncomfortable to
go there. It's too far, it's too far off the
beaten track. No matter how good your coffee is, there's

(07:48):
an inconvenience factor and they're not going to come, all right.
So that's sort of the distribution side. Make your product
available and accessible to the to the customer, all right.
So in a coffee shop, get a good location, and
then the marketing side is let them know that you're there,
like put a nice sign up on your coffee shop,
all right, Starbucks, You're never going to see a Starbucks
that doesn't have nice signage, all right, make the place

(08:11):
look presentable. Hopefully do some advertising or local publicity or promotion.
If you're one off, most of your customers on a
one off boutique coffee shop are going to come from,
say the local area. I'm going to say within a
three to four mile radius. That's what I assume. I'm
not in the coffee business, but I would assume that
most of your local customers are going to be locals.
All right, you know ninety percent of them, and then

(08:32):
you're gonna get ten percent drive by and that type
of thing. So let those people know that you exist,
Let them know that you open your shop, Send flyers,
do social media campaigns locally target that audience based on
area code. You can do that on social media. Then
people at least say, oh, there's a new coffee shop.
Oh yeah, I saw that on the corner. It's very accessible,

(08:52):
just down the street. I can walk there, or I
can pull in and they have a drive through, whatever
the case may be. Let's try it, and then people
try it, and by the way, they make great coffee,
and then people tell other people. So that's the formula
for success, all right. But having the great coffee just
doesn't cut it. That's not good enough, all right. You
have to have the great location, and you have to
have the right marketing campaign. You've got to make people aware.

(09:17):
That is the foundational elements of a successful business, any business.
So why should that be any different in indie filmmaking,
In the indie film business, it actually isn't, all right.
The problem is is that filmmakers do not treat filmmaking
as a business. Indie filmmakers, all right, Studio people do

(09:38):
in Hollywood. You know, there's a whole executive department, I
mean the entire executive division of a studio. I'm not
sure any of them have ever made a film like
I'm not sure they ever went to film school. I'm
not sure they even know what filmmaking is. Perhaps some
of them have never been on a set. But it
doesn't matter, because that's not They assign that those tasks
to the good filmmakers, the talented filma makers. What they

(10:00):
need to know. They need to know how business works.
They need to know how finances work, how revenue is generated,
how to manage a public company, how to manage infrastructure.
Their job is to manage and oversee a business operation.
Their job is not to make the movies. Yes, do
the company make the movies, Yes, of course it makes
great movies. But they're not the filmmakers. They're the managers

(10:23):
of the business, all right, and their job is to
hire good people in each of the elements of the
business filmmaking, finance, distribution, marketing, to oversee it all. I
would never expect a studio maker or studio executive to
be a filmmaker. It almost is a disconnect. It's almost
like what you went to film school and you learned
how to do you know, balance sheets and finance and

(10:45):
public offerings and stuff like that. No, you probably went
to law school or business school or something like that.
That's what I would expect. The same thing in the
distribution division. Filmmakers don't go to film school to learn
how to do distribution. People go to business school to
learn how to do distribution, to learn how to do marketing.
So in the distribution of marketing department, there's likely a

(11:06):
lot of people who would like to be a filmmaker,
but they're trained in distribution of marketing, they're trained in business.
All of them are savvy on spreadsheets and social media
and marketing and all this stuff that a lot of
filmmakers don't know how to do. So they're very, very
focused on the business elements of the film, all right,
as the finance people are. They're focused on just understanding

(11:28):
how equity structures work and deal structures and debt and
all this kind of stuff in order in order to
get the money or to structure the money in order
to enable the filmmakers to make the films. So these people,
the filmmakers, obviously they're trained in making good films. That's
their job. Now let's look at the indie film business,
because that's a studio, right, A studio's big thing, has
lots of divisions, lots of people, lots of infrastructure. Let's

(11:51):
compare that to the indie film business. And here is
the disconnect. Here is why I said at the beginning
of the show that the indie film business has actually
never actually been working properly. So when people say it's broken,
I say, no, no, no, it's actually not broken. It
just never started working properly, was never functional to start with.

(12:13):
Here's why I say that. By the way, not to
give away my age, but I started in the film
business in nineteen eighty six. As we sit here in
this podcast, it's twenty twenty five. All right, so that's
FORTENHS thirty nine years. I started when we were still
selling VHS tapes, I mean, not still, that was like
it for the first four or five years of my career.

(12:36):
Then DVD and then I mean, I've lived through a
lot of the film business, and I've seen a lot
of filmmakers come and go, and I've kind of observed
I'm talking from my observation right of thirty nine years
in the business, and then I can sort of project
backwards and say, hey, it's felt like it was sort
of the same throughout that. So let me explain the

(12:57):
reality of the indie film business. All right, Notice how
I call it the indie film business. As I said,
I don't call it film making. Filmmaking, as I explained earlier,
in a studio, is just one component of the business.
The disconnect is is that indie filmmakers are generally not
business people. Not only are they not business people, but

(13:20):
they're totally turned off by the business, the business components
of making movies. Right. They're totally turned off by the
concept of financing. They're totally turned off by distribution and marketing,
that's the disconnect, all right. The disconnect is is that
they think that they can be sustainable as in the
making of the films, without the other components actually happening

(13:42):
around them. And they say, well, but I'm not a
big company. I don't have a marketing department, I don't
have a distribution division. I say, no, I get that,
I understand that, But do you understand that without these
functions happening, you can't possibly have any chance of success
because no matter how good you make your product, if

(14:02):
it doesn't get out there to an audience, then nobody's
going to know about it and nobody's ever going to
see it. So there's a huge disconnect between focusing on
making the product and not understanding how it actually gets
sold and how revenue gets generated. So the reason that
I call it this disconnect is because filmmakers are artists,

(14:23):
especially indie filmmakers, well, all filmmakers, even in the studios. Okay,
they're artists. Their focus is always and always should be
on making great product. I mean, that's the point I said.
The first thing you got to do is you're going
to make great coffee. You've got to make great entertainment.
If you don't make great entertainment. When they watch it,
they're not gonna talk highly of it. And you're you know,

(14:45):
noboy's going to want to watch your product. So you
got to be a good artist. It definitely starts with
being a good artist, but it doesn't end with that.
All right, So filmmakers only focus on the art. They say,
my job is to be a good artist, and I say,
I agree with you. You don't necessarily have to be good

(15:05):
with spreadsheets, good with finance, good with distribution, good with marketing.
You don't necessarily have to be that person. But what
you do have to do, and here's the disconnect, is
you have to appreciate and understand that those functions must
happen properly, and therefore you have to affiliate yourself with
people who do that stuff well. In essence, you have

(15:29):
to kind of be part of a team. This is
what I say to my students. All right. I teach
in two film schools, and I say this to my students.
They say, you're in the film department in a big university,
and you're going to focus on making good product. But
you know, right across campus there's a business school, and
those people are going to focus on understanding how to
do marketing, distribution, finance. Those people are learning all those skills,

(15:53):
So wouldn't it make sense for you to walk across campus,
introduce yourself to a couple of marketing and finance majors
and say, hey, guys, do you want to maybe cooperate
be a bit of a team because I'm making this
great product, but I need someone to help me sell
the product. I need someone to help me market the product.

(16:14):
I need someone to help me finance the product. So
your skill sets complement my skill sets, and together we
can run a business, a successful business. And that's more
or less what a studio is, right, I mean, it
just happens to be that on a bigger scale. The
disconnect is that indie filmmakers. This is why I say
the indie film business has never really been run properly

(16:35):
because indie filmmakers generally don't do that all right. They
just focus on making the film and then they say,
oh that distribution will figure that out later, or we'll
will worry about it. Somebody else will figure it out,
somebody else will worry about that. Nobody else does worry
about it. Most films don't even get properly distributed, or
if they do, they filmmakers get totally screwed and bad

(16:56):
distribution deals because they didn't figure it out. If you
want to be successful as an indie filmmaker in the
indie film business, you got to treat it as a business,
all right. You have to recognize that the distribution of
marketing components and the finance components are just as important
as the artistic components. Basically, have a team an infrastructure.

(17:18):
You don't have to be a big corporation. Like I said,
walk across campus and say to a marketing person, when
I make this great movie, can you help me get
it out in front of audiences? Because here's the difference
between the marketing major and the film major in a university.
The film major only wants to focus on making the product.
The marketing major only wants to focus on figuring out
how to get something out to the market. These are

(17:40):
complementary skills. They don't want to do what the other
person does. The film person. They're not even interested in marketing.
They have no desire to do marketing all right. Even
if they did have the desire to do it, they
don't have the skill set because they focused on filmmaking,
not on marketing. This person has a skill set because
they actually focused on it. Then there's one other component

(18:01):
that is the disconnect is the resources to put it
all together to make it happen, which I'll talk about
in a second. But you don't want somebody who has
no skills doing something that they don't know how to do.
So that's why you have to get together and work
as a team. You have to cooperate. And for indie
filmmakers out there who listening to this, don't think that
you can beat the system. Don't think that you can

(18:23):
change how business actually works. And I'm not just talking
the film business. I'm talking every business. As I said before,
name any business on the planet that doesn't deal with
these three components finance, product and distribution marketing. I mean,
it's the way that business operates. So why do you think,
as a filmmaker that you are smarter or better, or

(18:46):
more capable or can somehow get around that system when
nobody on the planet can. That's the reason if there's
a disconnect is because you're thinking that it's only about product,
it's not. You need to have a team, you need
to have cooperation, Everybody says filmmaking is a collaborative venture,
and I say it's super collaborative, But most people forget

(19:07):
the collaboration. They think collaboration is, you know, a cinematographer
working with actors, working with directors, you know on set. Yeah,
of course there's a ton of collaboration there, but they
don't even understand that the real collaboration happens on the
distribution of marketing side or the finance side. That's the
true collaboration. That's the team. That's what you need. And
let me tell you something else, Cyindi, filmmakers, you cannot

(19:28):
possibly do this alone. It's overwhelming. It's way way too
much to do. A single human being just doesn't have
the time, the capacity, and generally the skill set to
do it all. There's too much to do. That's why
big studios and big companies have all these divisions. That's
why you put a team together. You can't be an

(19:48):
expert in every trade, as they say, you know, jack
of all trades, the expert of nothing. You want to
be really good at what you do, and then you
want to affiliate with people are really good at what
they do. You want skill sets to complement each other.
So even though you can understand, and I say to
my students all the time, understand what goes on here. Okay,

(20:09):
understand film tax credits, Understand distribution contracts, Understand marketing techniques. Okay,
you're not necessarily going to do them, you're not going
to execute them, but just understand and appreciate sort of
the narrative of what needs to get done. Just sort
of like I said, talked about the executives, just understand
the overview because as a filmmaker, you basically are a

(20:32):
business person. You are an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur, you're creating
a product and you're trying to get it out to market.
The disconnected in the film businesses is you're just creating
the product. You have not really thought too much about
how to get it out to market. So one of
the other disconnects is is the filmmaker in creates the
product says, I'll get a distributor and they'll get it
out to market. So if there's anything that's broken in

(20:53):
the system, that's broken because distributors aren't really getting the
job done these days anymore. Just the way distribution and works,
the streaming, all this kind of stuff there's vertical integration.
A lot of indie filmmakers get locked out. It's just
hard to penetrate the system and get to the audiences.
So I'm working on a lot of innovative ways to
kind of bypass sort of that broken, restrictive way of

(21:16):
getting to audiences, because the end of the day, it's
just about how do I put it in front of
an audience that's going to enjoy and appreciate my product
and hopefully pay for it. I keep saying hopefully, because
you know, it's getting harder and harder to get people
to extract their money to pay for quality. But I
still believe that people will pay for quality products. When
people say the film business is broken, I say, it's

(21:38):
just never been working because nobody has ever taken it
seriously as a business. Filmmakers generally do not treat it
as a business. They treat it as art. Now, I
got lucky in my life, all right, I'll tell you
how I got lucky. When I was graduating high school.
I think I said this story in another episode that
my dad said to me, so what do you think

(21:58):
you want to do in your life? And I said,
without hesitation, I want to be a filmmaker. And he said,
when you say you want to be a filmmaker, do
you want to be a And I didn't say I
want to be in the film business. I said, I
want to be a filmmaker, all right, So I was
focusing on making as well. All right, I wasn't focusing
on the business because I was graduating high school. I

(22:18):
din't even know what business was. So he said, do
you want to be a producer do you want to
be a director? And I said, I don't know what's
the difference. He said, well, a producer deals with all
the business components, money, contracts, legals, you know, organization, all
that kind of stuff, and a director deals with the
artistic stuff, which is basically making the film. So if

(22:39):
you want to be a producer, you should either get
a business degree or a law degree. If you want
to be a director, you should probably go to film school,
get a film degree, learn all the artistic components. So
I said, oh, that sounds pretty cool. I think I
want to be the producer. So what I do. I
went in an undergrad I got a degree in finance,
and then I went to law school and got a
law degree, but with the intention of going in being

(23:02):
a filmmaker. So now I's going to be a producer.
I'm going to be a film producer. I have business,
I have law, I've got the components that I need
to be a successful producer. But I still wanted to
make the films right now after I graduated. But twenty
six years in distribution, which was a really good thing
because I learned how the business works. Then I started
making films. But the truth is because of that one

(23:23):
conversation and because I trusted my dad and even though
I didn't even understand them, it made no sense to
me that I was going to go and get a
law degree in order to make movies. It makes total
sense to me now, but back then it didn't make
that much sense because I would have thought you need
a film degree to make movies. But as a producer,
my dad understood. He was an entrepreneur and he understood

(23:45):
how business works. He understood that all these business components
have to happen, just like in any business, in order
for the artistic components to happen. So he gave me
really really good advice, which I took and it worked
out really well well for me. So I'm giving you
that same advice. Right now, I'm saying, well, I'm not
necessarily saying to you filmmakers go to business school in

(24:07):
law school, all right, I'm saying, appreciate and understand that
the business components have to happen. If they don't happen,
you're basically handcuffed in being a successful filmmaker in the
film business. All right. You can always make a film.
You can be what I call a one and done.
You make one film, you make it good, you and

(24:28):
your family enjoy it, and your friends. It never gets
proper distribution unless you're super lucky and you stumble across something,
and then it's over because you didn't generate your money back.
If you want to be a sustainable, successful career filmmaker
who does this as a living, who makes film after
film after film, generates nice revenue, generates hopefully a good profit,

(24:51):
so that you can live a good comfortable life, live
in a nice house, drive a nice car, have a family,
go on vacations like, live a good comfortable life, and
still enjoy what you're doing filmmaking, then you have to
understand that this is a business, because it's the business
that creates that revenue. All right. If you want to
turn a blind eye, as most filmmakers do, and say

(25:13):
I'm just the filmmaker. I make the product and somebody
else does it as an entrepreneur, an independent filmmaker, it's
just not gonna happen. People aren't gonna come knocking on
your door and say, hey, can I raise money for
your film? Can I distribute your film? You're gonna need
to affiliate yourself with people who actually have that skill set,
who know what they're doing, and if you don't do that,

(25:34):
it's gonna be a very rough road. Let me just
reiterate I am. I want to make this very clear.
I'm not saying to you, the filmmakers, that you need
to be experts in spreadsheets and finance and distribution. I'm
not saying that be experts in making films, all right.
What I'm saying to you is affiliate yourself with people
who are those experts, all right. Collaborate with those people,

(25:57):
find people who skill set complement your skill sets, and
then together you can run a sustainable business. That is
the disconnect. That is why people say the indie film
business is broken, and I say, no, it's not broken,
because filmmakers have never treated it like a business. The
disconnect is treat it like a business. You treat it

(26:20):
like a business, like any other business, you'll give yourself
a very much much much higher chance of success and
ultimately you will make more films, have a much better lifestyle,
and be exactly what you set out to be, which
is a career filmmaker. Good luck. So as always, I

(26:41):
welcome lots of questions from the listeners. You can reach
me directly at my email address, Jdeverett at deverrettmedia dot com.
Please send me your questions and your concerns and I
will address them. And from wherever you're listening, please push
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