Book Review: The Art of Film Funding

This review, which I wrote, appeared previously on a different Web site. If you want the link to the original, please leave a comment below and I will contact you directly. If you want me to view it without publishing your name, I'll gladly do that. I keep no list of readers, so I won't sell it anywhere.

So you have a great idea for a movie? Join the club. The more important question is do you have the means to produce it.

In The Art of Film Fundraising, Carole Lee Dean explains that it's not enough to have a great script or a visionary director. "If you don't have funding, you don't have a film," she writes. "You might be able to pull off a small project with the help of [credit cards], but if you do not learn the art of funding, your film career is going to be very short."

While many books on film funding focus on whether a film should be made, Dean's book assumes that the reader has already answered that question in the affirmative. With that out of the way, she then poses ten questions (Why are you the right person to make the film? How many hours per week can you put into the film?) that potential filmmakers should ask themselves to determine whether they are truly committed to seeing a project through to completion.

In her book, Dean, who has produced more than a hundred television programs and started From the Heart Productions, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to funding films that are "unique and make a contribution to society," discusses the myriad ways to finance a film, including a detailed section on foundation grants. And while the book focuses exclusively on fundraising for film projects, the lessons Dean shares with her readers are more broadly applicable:

o Know who your potential funders are;
o Develop a strategy based on each individual funder;
o Keep your options open and seek multiple sources and types of support;
o View rejections as opportunities to learn and improve.

Throughout, Dean includes excerpts of her conversations with professional filmmakers, who provide a practitioner's perspective on the realities and technical aspects of filmmaking. The interviews not only provide useful tips but also illustrate how filmmaking has changed over the last couple of decades, as well as why fundraising for filmmakers is more important today than it was fifteen to twenty years ago. She asks filmmaker Morrie Warshawski, for example, where the best place to look for funding is, to which Warshawski replies: "It is too big a question to answer generally. If you are making an independent narrative feature film, you probably don't want to go to private foundations. On the other hand, if you are making a social issue documentary, then you absolutely do want to go to private foundations."

The book is divided into easy-to-follow chapters on such topics as what to include in a film proposal, how to research funders and write grant applications, and how and what to look for from individuals and businesses. Indeed, Dean's recommendations tend to be straightforward and practical (e.g., invite potential donors to fundraising parties at which snippets of a film in progress are shown), and the book often reads like a collection of helpful magazine articles rather than a book.

If Dean had simply published the book's fifty-page appendix of Web links, contact names, addresses, phone numbers, and other resources, The Art of Film Fundraising would be a valuable resource. But with all the additional information she provides, Dean has put together a toolkit that any independent filmmaker or nonprofit looking to produce a documentary film will want to keep close at hand.

Penmanship Lessons and Robert Frost

Uh oh, I may have to work on my penmanship. I'm notoriously sloppy in my handwriting -- an affliction for which I have been maligned since childhood. I've been told numerous times that I should have become a doctor, where bad penmanship isn't merely accepted, it's valued as a badge of courage (until someone dies because the pharmacy supplies the wrong drug because they couldn't read the script and didn't call the doctor, of course).

Robert Frost, one of the most famous American poets of the 20th century (and other than Maya Angelou, how many others do most readers know?), apparently had pretty bad penmanship too, and now it's haunting him while he spins in his grave. The argument, as I read it in the article, is altogether academic (i.e., a bunch of academicians arguing about things that most readers -- even of the New York Times -- might gloss over). But these are honest issues that matter in the world of literature.

I looked back at a couple of my journals this weekend and had trouble reading some of what I wrote. These are items that I penned within the past three or four years. It's not as though I'm looking back at stuff I wrote during the Reagan administration and trying to go back to what I was thinking about in my days of teenage angst. And I've written things in bed with the light off so I didn't wake my wife; that's not easy to do legibly.

I don't expect to be as famous as Robert Frost, but I do hope that I'll have a writing career worthy of note. I'm not about to change my penmanship for future Faggens, but I might be a little more conscious of being articulate. No one likes a muddy sentence, and I certainly wouldn't want the mud in my journals to be washed across the pages of the New York Times forty or fifty years from now. Because that makes all the difference.

As Jay Parini, a Middlebury College professor and the former head of the Poetry Foundation told the Times, niggling over the exact wording in notebooks Frost never intended for public consumption did not seem as important as, say, settling punctuation disputes about the published poems. The notebooks, Mr. Parini said, are "fun to read, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter anything about Robert Frost."

The Backstory of the Lock

This woman had a good idea, especially for readers who are into 18th century literature. Since I've been doing some research on the American naval hero John Paul Jones, I've regained some perspective on the 18th century -- an era I don't think I've given much thought since junior high history class. I studied Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock in college, but I've mostly forgotten about it.

Professor Sophie Gee, who is teaching at Princeton University, decided to write about the story of what led up to the tale described in the epic poem. Her debut novel, The Scandal of the Season, was published last year by Scribner. In a release that appeared on Princeton's Web site, she explained how she came to write about the real people who were the basis of Pope's mock-epic. Pope came to London as a poor aspiring writer and is able to insinuate himself in the world of the characters of the Rape.

"As a scholar you try never to jump from fact to fiction," Gee said. "At first I was extremely uncomfortable about it, but then I realized that what I was doing was giving a psychologically compelling account of what we do know, putting in feelings along with historical facts."

She's conscious of the danger of a professor creating fiction out of real people. One of Gee's challenges was to write the scene in which Pope and Swift meet for the first time, according to the release. She knew they had met in London during the period in which the novel is set, so she imagined the rendezvous at the opera, penning a scene in which the young Pope approaches Swift as he scoffs at the vanity of some fellow clergy members in the audience. The two writers later became great friends.

"It was thrilling to have a chance to inhabit a historical moment like that, because it was such a momentous literary encounter," she said.

But she has received strong reviews. The New York Times Book Review described it as "a clever and inviting piece of critical biography masquerading as a light comedy of manners."

In her teaching she is able to make the archaic references of 18th century literature accessible to today's teen agers and young twenty-somethings. For example, she juxtaposes the great satirist Jonathan Swift with the premier satirists of today: Trey and Matt of South Park fame.

I can tell I'd like this woman. She has always wanted to be a writer, she recognizes that a writer needs to be a strong reader, and she loves Irish literature. I'd enjoy spending a pleasant pub conversation with professor Gee!

Probability, Permutations, and Danica McKellar

I've noticed something interesting. I did the math, and without a doubt the most popular post on my blog is the one I did about Danica McKellar's book about math, Math Doesn't Suck.

While I'd love to believe this popularity is due to my wonderful way with words and the overwhelming popularity of binomials, I suspect it has more to do with the fact that McKellar remains an attractive young woman whose legions of fans still think of her as the nice, cute "girl next door" she played in The Wonder Years all those years ago. That the image of her in front of the blackboard, which I borrowed for my blog, pops up on the second Google-images page doesn't hurt my page counts either. But again, that has more to do with her fans looking for her than my using the image; my goal in this particular matter is to promote reading and math.

So I posted a comment on my own blog posting in which I invite people to leave a comment that I'll pass along.

I don't know McKellar, but I'm willing to pass along any messages -- correction, any tactful messages (i.e., I refuse to relay anything sexual or anything else that I suspect she'd consider rude) -- that come to me through this blog. The rude garbage I'll ignore and not post. What do I get out of it? Nothing. But I'd like to see my traffic flow increase, and from what I can tell, Danica McKellar is bloggable gold. And I suspect she can calculate the various probability statements and permutations for why that is true. My kingdom for non-Euclidean geometry!