Documentary Filmmakers Lament Hollywood Cutbacks and Deal Scarcity: ‘Our Ecosystem Is in the Midst of a Collapse’

Documentary filmmaking has never been a profession one enters into to get rich — though for a brief period it seemed possible.

Cable expanded documentary’s reach to wider audiences in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and films like “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “March of the Penguins,” and “An Inconvenient Truth” became legitimate box-office breakthroughs, but nonfiction features on the whole remained something of a stepchild within the larger Hollywood ecosystem until 2017, when Netflix acquired Brian Fogel’s “Icarus” for $5 million.

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At the time, the deal was one of the biggest ever for a non-fiction film. And it was followed by even bigger deals: In 2019 Netflix shelled out $10 million for Rachel Lears’ “Knock Down the House.” The following year Apple TV+ and A24 partnered to buy Jesse Moss’ “Boys State” for $10 million, and in 2021 Searchlight and Hulu bought Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s “Summer of Soul” for $12 million.

On the surface it seemed like people, even first time filmmakers like Fogel and Thompson, could actually get rich making nonfiction films, and that Hollywood, by paying seven figures, valued the form. But that notion quickly dissipated after Sundance 2021 when streaming services stopped having to build their slates and corporations consolidated resulting in less buyers.

Now the majority of doc filmmakers are struggling to get paid what they feel they deserve, which has been an uphill battle due to budget cuts industry wide.

April 5 at the Full Frame Film Festival, Amir Bar-Lev (“Long Strange Trip”) led a panel discussion titled “Documentary Dealmaking” exploring how doc filmmakers can earn fair wages during a time when the money available to 99% of docu filmmakers for budgets and licensing fees isn’t close to high.

Panelists Carl Deal (“Trouble the Water”), Susan Margolin (“Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy”) and duo Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (“Boys State,” “Girls State”) didn’t provide solid answers but did make thoughtful suggestions on how reset the way in which deals are made so that they are fair and sustainable for documentary workers.

Margolin suggested that doc producers and filmmakers refer to the Documentary Producers Alliance’s Documentary Waterfall Guidelines for guidance on how to structure the financing from the original budget through the allocation of net profits.

“Looking under the hood and really understanding the numbers and also having access to those numbers and making sure that that’s contractual,” said Margolin, who co-founded of the DPA. “That transparency is something that you can understand, dive into, and question.”

The normal rate for doc directors going into a project is 10% of the budget, but Moss suggested asking for more. Especially if that director is also producing the film.

“When I look at a budget, if it’s a good deal, I make 20% of the budget because we are all producing these films too,” Moss said. “We are not just taking the credit, we are actually doing the producing work. That’s how we work as independent filmmakers. Ten percent as a directing fee, that’s not actually enough. That’s not really sustainable in the life model sense.”

Deal maintained that “creating some sort of individual independent infrastructure” is important to make documentary filmmaking sustainable in Hollywood today.

But on a more bracing note, Margolin cited a recent newsletter by Brian Newman, founder of Sub-Genre, that likened the entertainment’s industry infrastructure to Baltimore’s now-collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge.

“We’ve exceeded capacity, while losing focus on the fundamentals,” Newman wrote. “Only the biggest can survive,” while “others need to merge to survive, and new entrants can’t emerge in the first place.” Taking aim at Wall Street’s appetite for quick results, he concluded: “We’ve had zero policy efforts to rein in the mergers and monopolies, and pretty soon a gigantic conglomerate will bump into our crumbling architecture and bring the system to a halt.”

Panelists also discussed the importance of not working for free, low development budgets, production company and sales agent fees as well as making the DGA a stronger ally for documentary filmmakers during the hour-long panel.

“Look what the guilds did last year,” said Deal. “It’s amazing and believe it or not, those very same guilds represent us. They are not as good at it as they are representing the fiction filmmakers in Hollywood. But they just need to learn and we need to lead them … We need to put pressure on them and ask them and engage and teach them, and then they will teach us and they will advocate for us.”

The problem is that most, if not the majority of documentarians, especially those just starting out in the business, are not in a guild due to high entry fees, high dues and minimum salary requirements.

“Until we can figure out the artist sustainability problem, we should all be really concerned about the next generation coming up,” said Margolin. “How are we going to support these emerging voices? That’s a big challenge.”

Audience member and doc producer Jameka Autry (“Burden of Proof”) pointed out that most producers and filmmakers at the festival are not concerned about structural contracts.

“The structural contract is for the 1% who have broadcast deals with Nat Geo and Disney and Netflix,” Autry said. “I think most of the room are actually independent producers and we need guidelines and support. We are independent producers, not this 1% who already have broadcast deals. You have a lot of people who were talking about the Golden Age documentary, and they cashed out and they cashed out big. We are not naming those names in this room, but none of those people are in this room right now.”

“Girls State” co-director and producer McBaine pointed out that no matter what point you are in a documentary career, it’s a struggle.

“Documentary in general has this history of people working for very little because we believe in what we are making because we believe in the politics, the message, the art, all of that,” McBaine said. “Even though I’ve been doing this for 25 years, it’s always going to be a struggle to find the right amount of money,  the right distributors, the right people to collaborate with. The hustle never stops. But I think that in having this conversation, we are trying to bring out into the open what can we all do? What can we ask for?”

Margolin pointed out that the panelists “are sort of at the apex of the ecosystem with storied careers and Oscars and tremendously lauded careers. But for the folks who are mid-career or starting out with maybe a second or third film, this moment is a moment of survival. Can we make that healthcare payment? Can we make our rent? We are losing really tremendous talent as a result of this scarcity. We have to come together as a community to talk about how are going solve this. Because that bridge collapse is a real apt analogy and our ecosystem is in the midst of a collapse.”

Full Frame Film Festival concludes on April 7.

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