Hacker News Reader

I think the key part to take away here is that the filmmaker is the one who desperately wanted to make it. The audience wasn't desperately waiting for him to make it. Just because he pours lots of effort in it, doesn't mean that the movie has intrinsic value.

edit: typo

But the audience does desperately want to be entertained. And while you could make a modest return on a modest investment some years ago, and iterate on larger budgets if you had a reasonable amount of skill and talent, that has become very much more difficult because the internet has disrupted things.

Good side, you can now make money on sites like Youtube, and the technical barriers to entry are low, so there is enormous upside potential. Bad side, that probably means short-form lowest-common-denominator stuff. Great if you are happy churning out episodes of Annoying Orange, a disaster if your goal is to make feature films. You end up with a 'superstar economy' where a small number of films make $$$$ and a much larger number make little or nothing. This was always the case to some extent but the internet has seriously exacerbated it.

Yes, the audience wants to be entertained. And they are being entertained, to the extend that the entertainment market is oversaturated and as such the value of entertainment goes down.

I feel like your second paragraph is just a reiteration of what it is like for someone who wants to produce something that is not valued by the majority of his apparent market. We do not really care too much about this in other markets and we should not do so in entertainment. If what he is doing is so incredibly great, he might try crowdfunding, patronship or another form of sponsorship - it has worked great for the artists of our history.

I think my point is, you can't demand to be paid for producing something you want to produce. It's a game of supply/demand.

Well, my underlying point is that you can't demand to be paid, (and never could), but that doesn't justify people infringing copyright and then using the fact of that infringement driving down the value to say that the product is worthless.

The infringement isn't driving down the value. Market saturation and lack of scarcity are driving down the value. Copyright is an artificial construction, an attempt to create scarcity where there is none.

Copyright infringement is, in most cases, the result of asking too much money for a product that has very little intrinsic value and the addition of customer-unfriendly measures to legal alternatives (read: DRM and all its woes).

(Regardless of its merits,) I don't think the argument is that the product should be free because the incumbents have exploited the public. The logic is that it should be free because supply is infinite; the exploitation is a side note.

Sadly some people do make that exact argument.

I have to disagree that supply is infinite. The marginal cost of supply is near zero, but the fixed costs are considerable. It's almost impossible to make a saleable film for under $100k. There are little breakout movies like Primer that are famous for being cheap ($7000 in Primer's case), but that's sort of marketing BS - the low number is what it cost to make a playable copy that could be submitted to film festivals but nobody talks about all the extra work involved to get it consumer ready.

The point is that costs are fixed, but revenues are not. They don't make a product and sell it once with a win. Of course you could argue that they have a business risk and all that, but at the end of the day, you'll have to work for every extra dollar you make and they don't.

Er...I am the 'they' you are talking about.

I love it when I'm being paid by the day because actual money ends up in my pocket. I have ownership interests in a number of films and the only reason I hold onto the contracts is sentimental value - none of them will ever make any money.

Only about 20% of films break even, and only a very small number of those make long-term royalty income - and that was true before the internet upended distribution models - which is why the careers of studio executives are so precarious. For indie producers, creatives, and technicians it's almost all business risk. Most projects don't pay very well (if they pay at all) and never recoup their production costs. At the indie end your goal is to win some prizes and get a film into distribution, and maybe make some of your money back if you put money into it. The win condition is that having distribution shows you can make work to commercial standard and maybe someone will like what you've done and give you a larger budget to work with.

To break even typically requires a film to spend about the same money on marketing as production costs, and of course films compete mainly against other films that are released around the same time. Unless you are exceptionally lucky and talented, there is little chance that you will make money with a production budget under $1 million. The typical 'low budget indie movie' that most people think of - quirky romance or gritty crime story - costs $5-10m.

Those are pretty high barriers to entry. It used to be that you could bootstrap yourself by doing some straight-to-video films that were not necessarily very good but were sufficiently adequate to find a small audience in between good big-budget movies, eg James Cameron's first directing job was on the Piranha 2 which was every bit as bad as the title suggests. But now that you can stream many movies you'd want to watch or download a high-quality movie if you're not happy with the streaming offerings, the fims with very small budgets are competing head-to-head with larger-budget offerings and of course the large-budget offerings win for all but the most devoted cinephiles and genre fans, of whom there are not that many.

Most people in the film industry never see any residual income worth talking about. And when they do, residuals are basically compensation for the fact that there are few regular paychecks to be had. You know the best way to make money in film? Run a food catering business. Regardless of the budget, it's an iron rule that production pays for the food and everyone gets at least one square meal a day. For short films and micro-budget projects, food is often the single biggest expense.

Yes. This. All of this.

It's incredibly challenging to make a profit on a genuinely independent feature these days - close to impossible, in fact.

And whilst YouTube apparently offers a new hope for video, the fact is it's its own creature, and really doesn't support drama - or anything that takes more than five times as long to make as to watch - terribly well.

Oh, lastly - sound recordist also works pretty well as a paid gig in film, apparently. It's hard to get a guy to hold a boom mic for 12 hours for free. But other than that, making cash in film is... tricky.

I am a sound recordist :-(

I'm really good at it and I don't work for free, but I am always being asked to, which is how I come to have an ownership interest in some films, I'll take a percentage depending on who's involved. The sad reality (and this is true for camera and lighting people as well) is that very often you're being offered/paid rental for your equipment and nothing for your work.

> you'll have to work for every extra dollar you make and they don't.

You don't have to work for every dollar either, just invest your money and collect dividends from your investment.

GP here. You're right about the relative unimportance of the side point.

However, the main point is not a prescriptive argument that the product _should_ be free, but rather a descriptive argument that the product _is_ free. I claim the market doesn't care about the cost of production, but rather only about supply and demand, when setting prices.

Well, from a purely market point of view, why would a market actor choose possibility A (get the movie for free) over possibility B (pay for the movie)? Or why would they choose B (pay for the movie) rather than C (not care about the movie at all)?

The successful answers to these questions have always been those where people choosing B actually get something (be it a warm fuzzy feeling of supporting good movies, a nice box, or just the convenience of an interface that allows you to simply find and watch a movie).

If you want to rely purely on IP protection for that movie, good luck - people can watch other people's movies, the next YouTuber's shoestring budget entertainment, or a football game? Why wouldn't they read a book, or spend an evening knitting nice red socks.

There is no inherent law of nature that says that we need more film producers or film directors, or that they should make more money than the singer-songwriter in the bar down the street, or that guy who makes his living composing music for films and adverts once in a while. Or more than the guy who spent 5-10 years of his life trying to sell pet food over the internet and noticing that the business model is not competitive.

It's the investors betting on (a) people finding your film more attractive than knitting red socks, and (b) you being able to monetize that fact properly.

"Monetization" can come in all sorts of shapes: selling individual copies of the movie, selling licenses to distribution companies (including Netflix), putting adverts on the movie, or streaming.

Given that we have Google Play and Netflix, you should think that there is some value in allowing an app store model of people buying any film they like. That this doesn't happen is partly due to the rightsholders of these films (usually larger companies) not seeing the point of that when people could also watch new movies (= more revenue for them).

You could also make an argument about culture. It would open your eyes to the many ways that the entertainment industry - or the majority of it in terms of capitalization and revenue - is not concerned about culture at all, and to the many ways that what we have now - in terms of grassroots/pastime content creation, publically funded culture (e.g. orchestras and theaters in many places), and large projects (such as films or video games) - of creating, revising and sustaining cultural artifacts.