If you wanted to invest in movies, where would you start?
This newsletter is about what you need to know to be a competent film financier, plus a few things I've learned about the entertainment industry over the years
For the past couple of years, my favorite part of my job at Slated has been thinking about raising and managing film funds.
It started out mostly theoretical: A potential partner would reach out about working together, we’d discuss what exactly they wanted to achieve, develop a plan of attack…and then invariably it would stall for one reason or another.1 Cut to a month or so later and we’d start the process again with another company.
You’d think that would be frustrating, and you’d be right.2 But there was a silver lining: By repeating that process half a dozen times in roughly two years, I developed a framework for how to partner with an institutional investor to finance a slate of movies.3
What that process also illustrated, though, is how few of the principles of film finance are known, let alone understood, by even the most sophisticated investors.
Most books on the subject are essentially clickbait for filmmakers: “10 Weird Ways to Convince Investors to Finance Your Film” and the like. But surprisingly, there isn’t a good guide for the investors themselves. So I decided to create one.
Welcome to Getting to Greenlight by me, Jason Scoggins, Slated's EVP, Head of Business Development.
(Thanks, Substack. Very subtle.)
I’m going to use this space in a three ways:
To think aloud about what it takes to be a competent film financier;
To develop a community of people with the same goal (getting their projects greenlit, or at least making progress toward production); and
To share some of what I’ve learned in my 25 years in and around the entertainment business, including my time representing writers as a TV Lit agent (and later a lit manager).
Tbh, that first bullet is most important to me, and I reserve the right to jettison the other two. I expect to post once a week on average, but given how tough it was to compile The Scoggins Report after I joined Slated, you can expect me to go dark from time to time.
But if you’re interested in hearing what I have to say and chiming in from time to time, I’d love to have you join me. Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.
And in the meantime, tell your friends!
I expected nothing less. It is the movie business, after all.
It’s better to have a film fund to manager than not have a film fund to manage.
And in the relatively near future I’ll get to share how that’s working out.