ben,
hello i am new to the forum and i live in the states so i am unable to view the clip. can you give a possible overview of what questions the investors asked her that she fumbled on.
i know its a long shot but did any of the dragons give her a chance?
🙂

Great post. You need to as much of a businessperson as a filmmaker. It's all about making money especially for the whole distribution of films. Nobody wants to make a film that won't make money. Art films and sending a message are great, but dollar signs fill the eyes of most investors. The business end of the film business gets left out of most discussions...that is a sad reality for most filmmakers.

Yes, but its the producers job to get funding, if you just have an idea you want to develop and dont want to produce it then you got to find a production company and pitch it to them. Otherwise you need a cost analysis report which is one hell of a lot of paperwork and research. Doesnt make sense just to tell someone your idea and expect them to throw millions of dollars at you, unless of course they have previously invested in you, and even then they will want to see a report.

quote:

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Originally posted by fjsmith81

ben,
hello i am new to the forum and i live in the states so i am unable to view the clip. can you give a possible overview of what questions the investors asked her that she fumbled on.
i know its a long shot but did any of the dragons give her a chance?
🙂

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OK. The upshot was that this filmmaker had completely unrealistic expectations about how she wanted investors to react to her pitch. A common mistake that many new filmmakers make is to assume that everyone else wants to see the film made for the same reasons as the filmmaker. This just isn't normally the case.

In the case of Dragon's Den, this filmmaker came in with an ill-prepared pitch and asked for an investment of ?185K ($370K) against a budget of ?1.2m ($2.4m). She'd never made a feature before or had any track record of managing a large-scale creative project like a feature film. The film was to be written and directed by this person, and the script based on a novel she had written.

Given the fact she had no filmmaking experience, the Dragons initially questioned her down the book line. Unfortunately she had no sales figures to hand, and when pressed, suggested that maybe around 2000 copies had been printed. But she also admitted that she didn't know how many had been sold. Hardly a ringing endorsement for the popularity of the book.

Next she was asked about potential cast, because obviously a big name might be something which is worth investing in. She mentioned she had a star interested in the script, but supposedly couldn't name him for contractual reasons. Again, when pressed for at least some previous credits for him, she mentioned Pirates of the Carribbean and The Phantom of the Opera. Of course, every web-enabled viewer quickly determined via IMDB that the actor in question was Kevin McNally. Whilst a competent actor, McNally is hardly a name you could hang a movie off. And to add to the lunacy of the suggestion, she added that ?1m of the budget was to go towards McNally's fee; leaving ?200K to make the film - and a fantasy film, no less. As you can imagine, the Dragons were pretty scathing with their response.

Of course Dragon's Den is forum which is manipulated for entertainment value, but the principles at work here are the same. Taking it out of the film industry for a moment, what we saw here was an entrepeneur approaching a bunch of potential investors with a business idea. But regardless of the quality of the business idea, the entrepeneur had no business plan, could only vaguely describe the business concept, and could show no detail to the investors on how they might make their money back.

Most investors are interested in at least seeing their money again at some point, ideally with some kind of profit. For reasons unknown, some newer filmmakers seem to think that films are different and the rules of investment don't apply. Certainly if you get funding from and arts organisation or similar, the terms of the investment may be more lenient, but if you're involving private investors, most are not interested in charity. If you can't pitch your film to them in business terms, showing evidence of how you plan to return their money to them, then you are doomed to failure from the start.

Think about it... if someone came up to you and asked you to put up ?10,000, $10,000, whatever, into say, a venture which was going to develop a technology to revolutionise the motorcar, you might well be interested. But before you stump up what, for you, is probably a significant amount of money, you'd certainly want to find out more about the technology, how it works, and what the plans were for commercialising it. Film is no different. Producers must be entrepreneurs and if you're a filmmaker who doesn't believe that, then your only chance of success is to hook up with someone who does.

?:)?

Ben

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Benjamin Craig
Editor-in-Chief, filmmaking.net