While it seems like everyone is at home all the time streaming movies and series on their TVs, philanthropic funding for filmmaking lags behind support for other arts. Funders made about three times as many grants for the visual arts as for film in 2021, as Inside Philanthropy noted in a recent overview on film grants, and about 10 times as many grants for music. Sure, some funders outside the arts are now recognizing the power of documentary film to amplify their messages and support their missions, as IP’s 2022 white paper “The State of American Philanthropy: Giving for Film” found. But many independent filmmakers still struggle to find money to create new work.
Part of the problem is conceptual. Some people see filmmaking as entertainment, not as an art form that needs support; the massive scale of the entertainment industry means some money surely slops over to the less-commercial endeavors. Others think that since filmmaking is fun, filmmakers can live on passion alone, paying their editors with income from a day job, plus savings, maybe selling their car along the way.
Also, they might do a lot of the heavy lifting themselves.
Funding a doc, shoestring style
This was partly the approach taken by filmmaker and radio producer Ben Shapiro (not that Ben Shapiro) for his first feature-length documentary, “Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters.” Shapiro spent 10 years following his subject, Massachusetts-based photographer Gregory Crewdson, doing the work on breaks from his paid jobs, using his own camera. “I shot it myself. I used my own gear. I didn’t pay myself. There was very little archival footage [to pay for]. I did the rough cut myself and then hired an editor for a few months,” he said.
Total budget? About $100,000. Shapiro covered costs with his own money, plus proceeds from a couple foreign-broadcast presales and through salary deferrals.
Shapiro’s final 80-minute film premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2012, then opened at Film Forum in New York City, played at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, went into limited theatrical release, and sold to Netflix right away. It was a New York Times “Critic’s Pick” and was reviewed in Variety and other places.
“You couldn’t ask for a better outcome,” Shapiro said. “Your first no-budget feature gets a theatrical release. It got picked up by a major distributor. I got an advance from the distributor. It sold to foreign television in a number of markets.”
But when Shapiro decided he wanted to make a film about legendary jazz drummer Max Roach, working with well-known filmmaker Sam Pollard as co-producer and co-director, he knew he would need outside funding.
This film would require extensive — and expensive — assets such as footage of Roach playing, and music rights. “There are between 30 to 40 songs that we had to license. We also had to license a ton of archival footage and archival photos,” Shapiro said.
This film required more back-office costs, too. “When you start doing this kind of movie, you have to hire an editor for seven or eight months. We had an archival researcher, a music rights person to license the music, a graphics person. We had to travel to do interviews all over the country and to Europe. We had legal fees. There are major contractual things with funders, broadcasters, distributors,” he said.
All these costs thrust Shapiro and Pollard into the position of many would-be filmmakers: hunting for funding. One place they looked: legacy foundations, which continue to provide much of the philanthropic sector’s support for film.
The big givers for small films
Some of the country’s largest, most recognizable private foundations are leaders in documentary film funding, as IP’s 2022 white paper noted: the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Foundation for an Open Society. Other top funders include the Wyncote Foundation, Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Lilly Endowment, Dalio Foundation, and the San Francisco Foundation.
The Ford Foundation, the nation’s largest film funder, gave more than $321 million to filmmaking between 2014 and 2018 through its Just Films program. The MacArthur Foundation, the second biggest funder of films, gave about one-seventh of that amount.
But here’s the rub for a filmmaker like Shapiro: Much of the large foundation money goes to organizations rather than to individuals. Some of these intermediaries regrant money to filmmakers focused on their areas of concern. But others run film appreciation or education nonprofits or organize film festivals and film societies.
The rise of the independent funder of independent films
Rising wealth stratification in the U.S. is spawning a rising class of would-be independent film execs — individual and family foundations funding film projects that align with their own mission and message.
One example of a non-arts-funder using film to amplify its impact is L.A.-based, vegan-focused funder Jim Greenbaum, who, as I’ve written, funds some independent films as part of his approach to “holistic effective altruism.” The thinking here: How better to convince a person to stop eating animals than to show how that steak got to the plate?
Greenbaum’s vegan funding ties into another trend our researchers found: a growing interest in films covering social justice issues and DEI. This focus is part of the reason some funders are supporting community-based nonprofits: By directing film funding to these intermediary organizations, they can better reach artists from historically marginalized communities. “Those intermediary/regranting organizations have created a number of new programs aimed specifically at supporting filmmakers from historically marginalized communities,” as our report put it.
The hunt for funding
Shapiro and Pollard started looking for support from “a lot of places everyone goes to: Ford. State arts councils. NEH. Sundance Documentary Fund. Independent Television Service, federal money. Catapult Film Fund. Tribeca Film Initiative. PBS. A lot of places turned it down.”
But not all. They landed a New York State Council on the Arts grant in 2016. They found support from the Reva and David Logan Foundation, a Chicago-based foundation that makes “strategic grants to support social justice, the arts and investigative journalism both in Chicago and around the world,” as its website states. In 2019, they also got a substantial grant from the Virginia-based Revada Foundation, which sponsors the arts and social justice, mainly but not exclusively around Washington, D.C. (The Logan Foundation has a grant application portal, while the Revada foundation accepts letters of inquiry.)
Additional funding came from Ford Foundation’s Just Films and Black Public Media, a New York-based nonprofit supporting content creators covering the “global Black experience.” Black Public Media is an example of the kind of regranting nonprofit many big grantmakers support. It has funding from all kinds of organizations, including MacArthur Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, New York Community Trust, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, New York State Council on the Arts and a lot of individual funders.
Shapiro and Pollard’s Max Roach project also won a prize, which came with cash, from another funding intermediary, The Better Angels Society, which supports documentaries about American history.
The total film cost under $700,000, and again, Shapiro and Pollard did not pay themselves. It was acquired for broadcast domestically on the PBS series “American Masters,” and also by PBS for international distribution. Those deals covered a substantial portion of the costs.
The final product, “Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes,” premiered at South by Southwest in March 2023, then aired on “American Masters” that fall. It won Best Music Documentary of 2023 from the International Documentary Association and a slew of other awards.
“It was a wonderful experience being able to work with Sam on a film about one of the most important musical artists of the twentieth century,” Shapiro said. The experience of seeking funding? Successful, but not as uniformly wonderful.
Should it be so hard to make an independent movie? As our white paper points out, the idea that independent documentary filmmaking is primarily a labor of love “holds back those who must labor for financial survival and tacitly accepts limitations on the voices and perspectives that come through in a medium that can be a powerful tool for education and social change.”
Funders are working to address these inequities, but more work remains. The struggle for funding continues to exclude many who need to spend their time earning money to pay their bills. That sounds like a good topic for an independent film.
