Welcome to The Holdout

This week, in 📣 Action Items, read the first batch of four secret financial life guest columns from veteran filmmakers and film workers. In 🕰️ On the Clock, we give you updates on the proposed federal film incentive and advocacy to revive fin-syn.

This is the first issue of The Holdout. We cover the business, news, labor, law and technology, craft, distribution and exhibition, and cross-border life of independent film in the U.S. We might not be able to do it all at the same time, but we’ll try.

📣 Action Items

I’m proud to introduce The Ledger, a financial life “as told to” column that embodies many of our holdout values. The first batch is four stories from longtime film workers about their money decisions, financial circumstances, and decisions they’ve made in order to “hold out” for independent filmmaking.

We ask that readers take them not as individual stories, but as a collection. They represent a variety of professions and financial positions. We granted some contributors anonymity and worked with them on specific details because we don’t think the focus should be litigating their lives, but on understanding how our peers have had to take risks. These collaboratively written pieces include not just often achingly personal narratives but hard numbers—rates, contract terms, percentages on loans—and disclose safety nets, family wealth, and support from partners. 

📄 Anonymous, Post-Production, Los Angeles

• This filmmaker went from making six figures in radio to a key post position on films that play Venice and NYFF, but now carries credit card debt from working on indie budgets.
  • “If I could maintain a weekly rate of $2,500, that would be fine. That’s still less than a standard studio, and it’s still so far from what many of these filmmakers are able to pay me.”

📄 Anonymous, Film Exec, New York City

• A film exec, who has also directed feature docs of their own, nearly declared personal bankruptcy, but still makes the case that debt is a risk worth taking for your art.
  • “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.”

📄 Dan Schindel, Film Critic, New York City

• A film critic pays his bills with a job outside film so he can keep writing.
  • “It took me a long time to build up the courage to approach sites that paid at a higher level, to internalize the idea that I could write for them at all. When sites started paying me around 2014, I thought $20 an article was a good rate, and $40 or $50 felt extravagant. I look back and wonder whether I was writing well enough to justify more. But you turn someone into a good writer by editing them well and asking more of them.”

📄 Anonymous, Producer, Upstate New York 

• This career producer took a salaried job just long enough to buy a house, then walked away from the paycheck and the experience of working on a $10 million indie to make films with artists.
  • “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.”

How This Works

The Holdout is being put together by me and two other long-time collaborators who also believe that indie film is worth fighting for. We’re putting our money down, and sharing in the ownership of the publication.

We aren't doing reviews, festival boosterism, puff interviews, repackaged press releases, promotional event recaps, personal rants, opaque case studies, or unverified tips.

The Holdout will publish two weekly newsletters. I’ll be writing this one, The Roundup, which will come out every Monday. It will be primarily reported, not aggregated. It will follow our instincts about what news is important for indie filmmakers, film workers, and audiences. We will also bring you policy updates and analysis in short explainers, and let you know if there are ways to get involved. You will get a preview below, in a short recap of the brewing advocacy toward bringing back some fin-syn rules.

The second weekly newsletter, The Revival, is written by Vadim Rizov. He’ll be bringing you verified box office success stories from indie cinemas across the U.S., updated booking availability of current and upcoming restorations, and a programmer spotlight from an exemplary rep house. 

The heavy repertory focus comes not just from anecdotes from programmer friends but data—Art House Convergence’s 2026 audience survey of more than 27,000 patrons at 50 cinemas shows that many more of them are coming for repertory programming rather than a filmmaker Q&A or themed night. In fact, repertory beats every event format as a draw and moviegoers under 40 care about classics even more than the overall audience. Our hope is that this information will help filmmakers and exhibitors do their work better, more adventurously, and more locally.

Besides our weeklies, we have two recurring strands. Firstly, our reporting. In the works, we have pieces on the true cost of distribution and marketing consultants and case studies we’ve identified from cinemas and bookers—the stuff that isn’t currently reported, because their progenitors aren’t self-promoters. But, somehow, they’re sustaining themselves and bringing meaningful work to audiences. Your paid subscriptions support this long-form work, but the pieces will be free for anyone to read.

Behind the paywall, we’ll also bring you more Ledgers and other service journalism. 

And finally, we’ll be writing about all of this with style. We’ll be plainspoken, informed, and unintimidated. We are, like you, inside the ecosystem, not observers of it. 

🕰️ On the Clock

What’s coming up → 

🗞️Federal Film Incentive

• The Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act (H.R. 10582 / S. 5552) offers a 20% transferable credit, stackable on state incentives, with 5% bumps for labor in disaster areas and, for “independent production companies,” up to 30%. The bill defines independent film as those produced by non-publicly traded companies, which would exclude Lionsgate and Angel Studios, among others outside of the tech streamers and traditional studios. There is also currently a floor of $1 million for both fiction and documentary features, and at least 75% of production days must be in the U.S. You can read the proposed bill here.
• It has bipartisan supporters, but has sat in Ways and Means since September 24 with no hearing and no JCT score. Backers want to attach it to must-pass legislation before the Senate’s targeted December 18 adjournment. 
• The supporters, organized through the U.S. Film & Television Production Coalition, include all the film unions. IFTA, Producers United, and the Future Film Coalition are the most obvious entities representing the indie sector, with FilmUSA for local city, regional, and state film commissioners.

🗞️A New Proposal for Fin-Syn?

• From 1970 to 1995 (or 1993, when the rules were relaxed), the FCC’s Financial Interest and Syndication rules barred the big three networks from owning most of the shows they aired or profiting from their reruns. Producers kept ownership, and an independent TV production sector grew up around that.
• Last month, the American Entertainment Alliance proposed bringing back a version of it. The Alliance is the big three agencies, CAA, WME, UTA, and starry producers like Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, and Jason Blum. Their headline ask is different from a direct spinoff of fin-syn, though—advocating for Congress to require major streamers to spend half their original budgets on acquiring independent U.S. productions. That’s a purchasing quota, not an ownership rule, but mirrors international precedent in EU streaming quotas and discoverability requirements in a prohibition on streamer self-preference.
• In March, at Sen. Adam Schiff’s “Lights, Camera, Competition” spotlight hearing, the Future Film Coalition proposed the EU’s streaming quota model as a benchmark, alongside transparency rules for platform acquisitions. 

Disclosure: I am a co-founder and board member of Future Film Coalition.