May 6, 1999 | Read Time: 8 minutes
Jon H. Else, who won the Filmmakers’ Trophy at this year’s Sundance Film Festival,
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spent nine years trying to raise enough money to produce the documentary Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle.
Tom Ciesielka, a Chicago filmmaker, ended up earning about 20 cents an hour during the five years it took him to produce the Emmy Award-winning documentary Frank Yankovic: America’s Polka King.
And Joshua Seftel, a filmmaker in Arlington, Mass., ran up a debt of $40,000 on seven credit cards while he was making Taking on the Kennedys, which was selected by Time magazine as one of the 10 best television programs of 1996.
Cobbling together money from government agencies, foundations, corporations, and individuals to make documentaries has never been easy, but now filmmakers who specialize in non-profit, non-commercial films say fund raising is harder than ever. Ironically, the money squeeze comes at a time when documentaries appear to be more popular than ever — playing to growing audiences in theaters and on television.
“We’re in the preposterous situation where even established filmmakers have to file hundreds of grant applications and beg for money everywhere just to produce an independent film,” Mr. Else says. “Funding has a death grip on us. I spend half of my time fund raising.”
Says Loretta Smith, a filmmaker in Chicago: “The cycle all too often with documentary filmmaking is shooting and then grinding to a halt when you run out of money.”
The reasons for the money crunch are varied. In 1996, Congress slashed the budgets of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts and instructed the arts endowment to eliminate most of its grants to individual artists. Since then, support for film projects from the endowments, and from the state agencies that get money from the endowments, has declined.
But money was already scarce. Relatively few foundations make grants to film projects, and raising money from individual donors is especially hard work because independent filmmaking is often a one-person business. While corporate support is sometimes available for documentaries, it tends to go to a few high-profile producers, or to underwrite entire public-television series, not single films.
Other sources of filmmaking money that are associated with public television — the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Public Broadcasting Service, and the Independent Television Service — can support only a fraction of the projects seeking funds. In its eight-year history, the Independent Television Service, for example, has given money to fewer than 300 projects. During that time, the service has received as many as 11,000 applications for support.
No one knows how much charitable or government money flows each year into documentary projects, which have budgets ranging from a few thousand to a few million dollars. But experts inside and outside the field agree that documentaries — which, they say, are an art form and a means of communication — deserve support.
“Documentaries provide the public with information about issues of concern to our foundation and to the world,” says Woody Wickham, vice-president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in Chicago. “They diversify the range of views, opinion, analysis, and voices we hear.”
Still, says Joan Shigekawa, associate director for arts and humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York, “the field is chronically underfunded.”
Ms. Shigekawa chairs a Council on Foundations’ group called Grantmakers in Film, Television and Video. The group, she says, is leading an effort to encourage more foundations to support independent filmmakers and other media projects. It has recently sponsored discussion sessions at meetings held by the council, and its film and video festival, which showcases documentaries supported by foundations at the council’s annual meeting, was also presented last year for the first time at other grant-maker meetings, such as one for community foundations.
Ms. Shigekawa says she is hopeful that foundations, many of which are rethinking the way they support forms of communication, will recognize filmmaking as an important and creative approach for spreading their message.
“There’s a tremendous interest in learning how to advance the mission of foundations using all technology available to them,” she says. “Film, video, and TV media are wonderful ways to tell a story, fabulous assets to anyone who has a grant program and grant making that they’d like to share broadly.”
In addition to the effort by the grant-makers’ groups, other developments may end up making it easier for filmmakers to obtain donations. Among them:
* A group of foundations and individual donors is introducing a new fund next week, called Creative Capital, to support individual artists, including documentary filmmakers. The fund, which so far holds $5-million, will award grants of between $5,000 and $20,000 each.
* The Center for Independent Documentary, in Waban, Mass., which provides assistance and equipment to independent producers, plans to step up its work with foundations and other potential supporters of film projects. The center hopes to increase the number of seminars it sponsors around the country that are designed to help grant makers understand the filmmaking business, including how to evaluate a film budget.
* PBS is introducing a new series this fall called Independent Lens. The show will feature a mix of fiction and non-fiction films by independent producers, opening up another outlet for documentaries to reach a broad audience. The series is part of an effort started about three years ago by PBS to reach out more to independent filmmakers. Last year, PBS introduced a new section to its World-Wide Web site, called “the indie scene on PBS” (http://www.pbs.org/independents), that features independent work currently being shown on public-television stations and includes information about how to look for donations and plan for distribution.
* The International Documentary Association, a Los Angeles group that promotes non-fiction film and video and collects donations on behalf of independent producers who are raising money for their projects, plans to open up a second office in New York this year. “Documentaries are showing up everywhere now, especially in cable television. There’s a whole market on the East Coast that we need to address,” says Grace S. Ouchida, the group’s associate director. “The problem is that as the outlets for documentaries have significantly increased, being able to find funding has not changed.”
Raising money is especially difficult for producers interested in making films about hot-button issues like abortion, filmmakers say. Ever since a national debate erupted about a decade ago over some controversial art sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, donors have been more reluctant to give to certain projects, they say.
“The amount of money that has been lost when federal funds were cut is marginal compared to the atmosphere that that loss has created,” says Gail Silva, director of the Film Arts Foundation, a non-profit group in San Francisco. “It created a chill. Things that are funded now tend to be more predictable or more homogenous.”
Vivian Kleiman, a producer who teaches film at Stanford University, says that while the entry of for-profit cable stations into the field has increased the number of outlets for documentaries, it also has narrowed even more the type of projects that win support.
“The dream was of 500 cable stations dedicated to a variety of documentaries,” she says. “Instead, we have stations that have a very narrow spectrum as to what kinds of documentaries they will have. They are not innovative ones or diverse ones. If you’re out on a limb making a documentary, you are not going to be able to sell it to funders by saying it’s going to make it on HBO, because it is not.”
Ms. Kleiman herself recently had trouble finding money for a documentary she wanted to do about prison inmates putting on a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. She ultimately had to return grant money she received from the California Council for the Humanities because she couldn’t find enough backers to pay for the rest of the project.
Such frustration could be particularly discouraging for emerging filmmakers, Ms. Kleiman and others say.
Sarah Jackson-Han, a freelance journalist who wanted to make a documentary about illegal Chinese immigration to the United States, was so daunted by the prospect of writing dozens, even hundreds, of grant applications that she applied for money to only one foundation and to the Independent Television Service. When the service turned her down, she abandoned the project.
For many independent producers, though — nearly all of whom have other jobs — filmmaking is their passion.
Even Mr. Else, who says he had to take a break from filmmaking after what he calls his “nine-year nightmare” raising money for Sing Faster, is already planning his next project.
That documentary, which will be about options traders on the floor of the Pacific Stock Exchange, will cost about $100,000 to make, he says, considerably less than the $350,000 it took to produce Sing Faster. The main cost-saving measures: a small production crew, and switching from film to video, which is cheaper to use.
Although the broadcast quality of video is not as good as film — and its use, he says, is not appropriate for every project — Mr. Else appreciates having a less-expensive alternative. As the technology for video cameras and editing equipment improves, production costs might decrease even more.
Says Mr. Else: “Anything that makes it less expensive overall takes us that much further away from being at the mercy of having to raise money.”
