The Ledger: Anonymous, Film Exec, New York City

As told to Abby Sun

The Ledger is The Holdout’s irregular column on the often-hidden financial realities of independent film workers, as told to our editors. This edition’s contributor made micro-budget documentary features while working across the film & TV industries in different roles. Raised by a parent who treated personal bankruptcy as a financial tool, they describe financing their films with savings, loans, and an angel investor; seeing almost nothing back from distribution; and their ongoing relationship to credit card debt. They asked to remain anonymous. This account has been edited and condensed from a questionnaire and an interview.

🗂Profession: Film exec

🕰Years in the industry: 15

📍Based in: NYC

How Far Can You Push Debt?

My mother is declaring bankruptcy for the fourth time. Her attitude toward it was always very casual—there are tricks to build your credit back really quickly afterward, and it’s not a big deal. She’s an entrepreneur. She’d start all these businesses, some more successful than others, and managed all the money in the household. I learned through proximity. 

I wasn’t raised in poverty. But as an adult, I understand that a lot of what I was raised on was credit card debt, held by someone who was not afraid of it. She was very skilled at playing debt as a financial instrument: how far you can push it, which cards to apply for, different kinds of payments you can make.

I found film at a summer program when I was a teenager. I’d wanted to be a journalist, and wrote a lot growing up, but writing didn’t feel as visceral as making a raw little short—video diaries, collages of sound and image, a song that heightened what I was feeling—for no one but myself. It was love at first sight.

I studied film production at an experimental program, not one of the big industry schools. It was mostly theory. In the mid-2010s, when I got into the real world and thought, I went to film school, now I must get a job in film production, I realized I didn’t have that education. My first survival job was making marketing videos for an e-commerce company. Then my roommate in LA knew someone working on a reality show about dogs, which paid nearly $2,000 a week. That’s how I saved a little and made my first feature for $30,000, which was basically all my money from the reality show plus personal loans. 

“The Economics Don’t Make Sense”

I moved to New York with a job in film distribution, making $50,000 a year. While working there, I got a single raise to $70,000. I’m not a great budgeter, so even that was hard.

That job exposed me to so much film budget bloat, so many unrealistic expectations from filmmakers about what things cost, and how hard it is for people to make certain amounts of money. When you’re working with a streamer, they have so much money, so why can’t they just give it to filmmakers? I was on the receiving end of calls from really frustrated filmmakers, always giving bad news. I started becoming jaded, and I didn’t want to be.

I decided that if I kept making my own documentaries, I wouldn’t go the commercial streamer or grant route, but go as far as I could by doing as much as possible myself. I’d seen so much heartbreak and so much time spent, and grants give you pennies. I also never felt like my work would be accepted by the doc industry because it was so DIY. I’d never really hung out in the doc space or made many friends there, and I had a chip on my shoulder. But I knew how sales and distribution really worked. If I want an investor to make money, and if I want to make any money, the budget can’t be $1.5 million. 

The economics don’t make sense. My second film was released digitally only. It’s made somewhere around $20,000 so far. For the first, the distributor gave a $0 MG, of course. I couldn’t even afford the E&O insurance they required, so they gave me a $3,000 loan instead, and also paid for a publicist and other costs. They record more than 10% annual interest on all of it. [Ed. note: a common, if punitive, creative accounting practice distributors use to inflate expenditures and decrease a film’s cross-collateralized net profit.] So, though they licensed the film to a streamer for low five figures, the biggest quarterly check I’ve ever gotten was about $500. I was so happy to get that, because my movie made money.

A few years ago, I left the film industry for a job in another field, making above $200,000 a year, and I discovered credit cards for myself. Between 2022 and 2025, I racked up close to $65,000 in debt and didn’t save anything. In 2025 I had a big, rude awakening and was going to declare personal bankruptcy. I thought, it’s not a big deal. I don’t want to buy a house. You can build your credit back in a year—because I was raised with that. 

I still think a little debt is okay to carry. But now I’m more financially literate, so I understand things I didn’t before.

“A Conundrum for How I Should Live”

I’ve never expected my art to sustain me and never had that goal. So, I’ve had to get creative about how I make money, given the amount of debt I’ve had. At the same time, I was raised in the suburbs by a mother who declared bankruptcy three times, so I’ve developed a certain taste. I like material things, comfort, clothes, nice facials. I’m very experimental in my approach to art, which suggests I should live in Baltimore on $2,000 a month. That’s created a conundrum for how I should live.

My husband is also an artist himself, but he makes more than I do, so he pays more of the rent. He’s really good at saving and investing. Now I’m on a savings plan and only have $10,000 left on my debt. Friends tell me that’s so high—for me, it’s low. I need a decent salary every month so I can aggressively chip away at it and still pay rent.

In 2025, I didn’t have a job. I lived on credit cards and consulting, because I knew those doors would open. Now I’m a film executive at a new company, which is the most fulfilling job I’ve ever had, because it combines my executive brain and creative filmmaker brain. I took a pay cut, but it’s temporary. Everyone has a different standard of living, a different idea of what they need to survive. There is a world where there is a sustainable future for indie filmmaking, but right now, it doesn’t totally exist.

I love making documentaries, but I don’t think I’ll make another one, at least right now. The documentary world feels so insular and catty to me. Last year, I wrote four narrative scripts. I have to keep making things. I tell everyone who’s young, “Just make the thing. Go into debt.” That’s probably a really reckless thing for me to say, but I need to make things for my own sanity, even if the way I’ve made money, lost money, and created debt is insane. 

I’m approaching middle age and figuring it out. I never want to declare bankruptcy. I’m undoing the trauma of my childhood.