The Ledger: Anonymous, Producer, Upstate New York

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 moved from contracted work and internships into full-time producing, pivoting from a formative experience on a $10 million indie to running a one-person shop producing super indie, low-budget work. Throughout, they return to what film workers owe each other—fair pay, honest credit, and creating the “small families of people making things” that drew them to film in the first place—while living, by their own estimate, near the poverty line. They asked to remain anonymous. This account has been edited and condensed from a questionnaire and an interview.

🗂Profession: Producer and curator 

🕰Years in the industry: Three decades

📍Based in: Upstate New York

Money Gives and Takes

My father had a series of failed businesses. To this day, I can’t sit in an office chair, because our living room was always stacked with office furniture from them. We were told we were middle class. I credit my parents for spending what money there was on culture. We didn’t travel, but I was being dragged to foreign movies when I was eight—that was my mother’s cinephilia. I saw Day for Night [1973] and wanted to become a script supervisor. If I’d seen something like Harlan County, USA [1976] instead, I would have been a union organizer. I liked anything that involved small families of people making things. 

I didn’t feel the deception until my parents divorced. In the middle of the custody fight, I was supposed to get my first pair of contact lenses. They were withheld: “Your mother’s not behaving, so you’re not getting contact lenses.” I remember thinking, oh, that’s what money is—it’s given to you, and it’s taken away.

I started working at 14. In high school, my mother said, “If you don’t leave home, I’m going to start charging you rent.” I’ve been on my own financially ever since. College was all scholarships and grants, but I still needed to work at the publication where I’d started as an intern. I took out a $1,000 loan in my last year and paid it off within a year, but I wasn’t especially prudent. I took a grant and bought really good professional speakers, which I still have. 

I was always working to survive, and when I made a chunk of money, I’d spend it on travel, records, or generous gifts for friends. In my 20s, I moved to Europe and worked more odd jobs: copy editor, bartender, in radio, as a DJ. Up until my 30s, I had total financial precarity. I’ve never invested. I know nothing about the stock market. Having seen at an early age what it means for a small business to fail, I’ve always been afraid of going out on my own. If it’s a matter of making a living, I’d prefer working for a solvent company. 

In my late 20s, I moved from Europe back to New York, interning at an archival house. My cash job was at a video store, but that’s the only job I’ve been fired from. The manager put me on the schedule for Christmas and New Year’s, and I’d worked 40 hours that week. I asked him, “Where’s the overtime?” He said, “You can be easily replaced.” He made me work the holidays, and the next week I was off the schedule.

I PA’d on music videos, maybe twice, then went straight to producing. I also took jobs way above what I knew how to do, because I needed to make rent. On an early job for a TV pilot, I started as location manager, which suited me, then people started quitting and they asked me to be the UPM. I might not have known what I was doing, but I observed that they also didn’t know what they were doing. Afterward, the producer offered to recommend me for other jobs. I think I’d witnessed so much that they were trying to hush me up.

“Should I Be Grateful for This?”

After ten years of moving from apartment to apartment since I’d left home, I understood that my precarity could be helped by home ownership. In order to get a mortgage, I needed a full-time W-2 job and pay stubs, so I took a job at a post-production house. I bought before 2008, so when all that went down, I’d somehow benefited from it. I questioned the decision for years, because I kept leaving the house to work in other cities, but I gradually built up equity. Post-COVID, and with NYC residents fleeing the city, it has definitely appreciated. I recently had a five-figure car repair, which is ridiculous. Everyone told me to just get a new car, but I love my car, and more often than not, my car is my office.

After securing the mortgage, I left my full time job and went out to LA to work on a $10 million independent film. It was every cliché of that moment, when first-time investors took a chance on people who’d made one scrappy indie and gotten an agent. I worked exclusively for the director. There was a gaggle of “producers,” including the actor, his business partner, a lawyer, whoever. They offered me an associate producer credit instead. It was devalued. I took a creative consultant credit. 

Other people told me, “You really fucked your career,” because the film went to Cannes. My decisions aren’t always career-savvy. That film taught me a lot about how you treat people, and that I don’t need to work on things where the process of making them is that broken. 

A few months later, I went to a festival in Europe known for radical work. I saw so much, and met all these filmmakers from Europe, Asia, and South America saying, “Oh, yeah, I made this feature for $20,000.” It wasn’t $10 million and people figuring out their coffee budgets. That’s where I started meeting filmmakers I still work with.

I could have stayed in post and kept a steady paycheck. I was surrounded by other producers and filmmakers making great work, even though I wondered how they paid their bills. A friend and fellow producer pointed out that we were outliers—we weren’t independently wealthy, we didn’t have partners who supported us, or rich benefactors. Somehow I thought I could invest the time and money it takes to get projects going without a safety net. It was somewhat aspirational—or delusional. I started my own company then. Then I started realizing, no, I don’t even have the foot up of seed money or a partner. That’s why so many filmmakers have real estate and renters.

I’m ambivalent about what it means to have a company, because a company should have a structure and health insurance. I’m adept at that—I love doing accounting or onboarding on projects in addition to everything else. My accountant, who I’d describe as an anarchist accountant for artists, has been with me since my late 20s. She was kind of my therapist for years. She works with a lot of film people, and she’s still shocked sometimes. She’ll look at my 1099s and say, “Why are you doing this?” It gets especially contentious when I tell her about having to chase monies I’m owed.

For a decade, through the 2010s, I programmed for a festival on a year-to-year contract. I was making $1,800 a year to be part of a team (which I really dug), write catalog blurbs (for both my selected films and others), curate special events, run interference with sales agents and distributors to secure films, and then attend the festival for two weeks. Every year we’d sweat over whether our contracts would be renewed, and we’d already have started working. I was asking my fellow programmers, “Why isn’t there a union? Should I be grateful for this?” 

I continue to curate in other realms since, but I miss the festival vibe, because it was a camaraderie. The work I do is solitary. I’m physically the only person in my “home office,” so my encounters with the movable feast of like-minded people and IRL exchanges occur when I travel for work, or to festivals. It’s that shared group thing I often yearn for.

Programming and curating and producing is a natural continuum for me. I also do grant reviews, which makes me more sensitive to the work that is being made, and the struggles that accompany them. Financially, I always need multiple things going, because I know the producer stuff isn’t sustainable at all.

“A Generous Gesture”

I’d say royalties and commissions are a quarter of my income. That’s the wake-up-and-do-that job, because it takes constant vigilance—for any artist or filmmaker, the catalog is the hustle. There’s educational sales, screening fees, and larger acquisitions. I licensed one film to a distributor in a more traditional deal, and they’ve done in seven years what I could do in a week—I still don’t get royalty statements from them. I’ve started demanding that commissioners with grants break the budget down. I just did it with someone in Europe. I knew the grant was six figures—if it’s six figures, why am I fighting for a quarter of that? Why is the artist getting a fraction of this?

My experience affects how I pay collaborators. For instance, I don’t do deferred, because I have waited on deferred fees that never get paid. On my last feature, I paid locals both gas and mileage, instead of gas or mileage. That was another $1,500 or so. I ask keys who have crews what’s fair for the budget range at hand. A lot of producers don’t look at the real facts of a film. They say, “This is what we have on paper,” when they really have more in the bank, and ask you to work below your day rate.

On one project, with an artist who had a very small budget to make an ambitious short film, the DP made more than I did, and I’ll never see another penny from it. I was the producer, line producer, accountant, PA, and took a small percentage of the budget. But there was no question: I wanted that DP, she was great, and I didn’t want to disrespect her by offering her a number proportional to the budget. I’ve never done what a lot of production companies do, where suddenly there’s a line for 16% overhead. My overhead is what doesn’t get covered— health insurance, taxes, filings. Doing it this way isn’t sustainable.

A writer once said to me, when I told him what we could pay, “You’re never going to pay me what I’m worth.” I totally agree.

A couple of times, I’ve asked a crew member, “How would you feel about a reduced rate and an enhanced credit?” I got lectured by others for offering co-producer credits, but they made a creative contribution by agreeing to work below their rate. Working for below your rate is a generous gesture, and it should be rewarded.