Every year, during the bureaucratic lightning round that is Utah’s legislative session—from 2017–2020—there has been a designated “Film Day on Hill” held in the Capitol Rotunda in Salt Lake City.
I remember registering for Film Day last year and looking forward to it more than usual after two consecutive virtual gatherings—I even preordered a box lunch.
Alas, I was struggling with some intense anxiety and couldn’t make it—2023 had a rough start for me. Thankfully, UFA™ VP Mario DeAngelis could go, so the Utah Filmmakers™ Association was represented, and the lunch I had ordered didn’t go to waste.
Cultural Industry Advocacy Day 2024 presented an opportunity for the UFA™ to connect with more of Utah’s film community, as well as other local nonprofits. We enlisted the services of Associate MemberDB Productions Utah to answer a call from the event organizers at the Utah Museums Association to have an “interactive exhibit” in the Capital Rotunda. We were given a prime location between the Salt Lake Film Society and the Sundance Institute. Unfortunately, no one from Sundance was at their table. As we said in our Instagram post, “...we were happy to step up and make sure their allotted space still represented them. We happened to have a piece of Sundance Film Festival history... displayed on their table: An authentic Sundance Film Festival RejectionLetter. They don’t send those out anymore.”
Dare I ask if the Utah Filmmakers™ Association stood out among the other exhibitors? Images courtesy of the author
In addition to the novelty of DB Productions Utah’s signature photo kiosk—book them for your event today!—we gave out official Utah Filmmaker™ buttons.
Images courtesy of DB Productions Utah and Utah Filmmakers™
We also presented two slide shows: One featuring our Associate Members and the other highlighting the organization’s engagement with the community, production support, and other contributions since its founding in 2002.
The slideshows were presented silently on the day, but the versions we’ve made available through YouTube—now featured on our website—have incorporated licensed soundtracks courtesy of Associate OrganizationAmphibious Zoo Music.
The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and—especially where guest posts are concerned—do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the Utah Filmmakers™ Association, its Officers and/or Associates.
In short, the state—through the Utah Film Commission—invites filmmakers worldwide to produce their movies and series in Utah by highlighting local resources such as unique filming locations, support services, experienced crew members and actors, etc. The film incentive—a 25% rebate—is available to qualifying productions that spend a defined amount of their production budget within the state. For example, if a film production spends $1,000,000 in Utah—a claim that has to be verified by a third-party audit—they may receive a rebate of up to $250,000.
The impact of money spent on film and television production in Utah is not limited to the local film industry; it’s also advantageous for ancillary industries and sectors as well. Fees for location permits benefit municipal, county, and state governments. Hiring local crew members and actors, catering and vehicle rental, hotel accommodations, renting equipment, and studio space benefit local businesses, enabling them to pay their employees. Employees pay local taxes; they buy groceries and pay for their housing and transportation, and myriad goods and services for their personal needs, benefiting even more local businesses, who have their own payrolls to meet. They may not even realize that the film industry’s economic impact also works to their advantage.
This begs a more specific question: How much do film projects by local filmmakers affect the local economy?
The answer depends on whether or not—and to what degree—those local filmmakers understand and accept that the business of filmmaking cannot be separated from the art form.
As I’ve previously discussed, in the Venn diagram showing how creative industries and their adjacent communities overlap, local filmmakers may find themselves in one of three archetypical roles: Industry professionals, working-amateurs, and faux-professionals.
There are indeed a number of Utah-based film industry professionals. They understand and respect that filmmaking is as much a business venture as it is one of artistic expression. They have established effective and sustainable business models. They understand that prioritizing people with fair compensation is essential to creating a quality film that can see a return on investment. One important characteristic they all share is knowing that no one person can do it all. They know their professional strengths, have the integrity to acknowledge their limitations and respect the varied, complementary talents of those they work with, trusting them to do the same. They embrace the standards and best practices of the industry, maintaining due diligence through all stages of production and effectively managing assets and required deliverables from concept to distribution. This is what professional industry filmmakers do: employing themselves and others, doing their part to sustain the industry, and making a quantifiable difference in the economic landscape.
The working amateurs are those filmmakers who have managed to corner a niche within the local market that’s technically part of the larger industry, embracing business models with a modicum of sustainability—at least for those above the line. Their priorities are in the saleability of the finished product with a maximum return on a miserly investment. They don’t embrace industry standards so much as meet minimal requirements. Best practices will almost always be substituted with whatever they can get away with legally, if not ethically. If a loophole will save them money on production, they’ll find it and exploit it. They understand the business well enough to know that a mediocre film—with a built-in, albeit less discerning, audience—that’s done its due diligence has a better chance at distribution and profitability than an otherwise flawless work of art that can’t produce a chain of title, signed contracts, and/or other deliverables that reputable distributors will ask for.
Faux-professionals are well-versed in the jargon associated with their craft. They take themselves—if not the art form—very seriously, an unfortunate and potentially volatile combination of the Dunning-Kruger effect and unchecked narcissism run amok. More often than not, the responsibility for the unsaleable nature of many local productions—I’ll refer to them hereinafter as “community films”—rests squarely with faux-professional community filmmakers. Having never let go of amateur thinking, they prioritize the completion of a film over its distribution, assuming that the completed project will be so good that it will sell itself—grossly underestimating the importance of basic business planning and the necessity of due diligence. They are so focused on getting to say “That’s a wrap” to the applause of an exhausted and under-compensated crew that every decision they make leading up to that point is rooted in a scarcity mentality. Problems that can easily be avoided by not starting preproduction until proper funding is in place are simply dealt with along the way. Lacking any practical means to hire the professionals needed to do the job right, they cut corners just to get the job done, starting—most often—by requiring most of their cast and crew to waive or defer payment and convincing those above-the-line to accept rates that aren’t just below industry standards but even fail to meet the federal minimum wage.
Faux-professionals like to refer to themselves as “in the industry” because they sincerely believe that they are. Actual film industry professionals may beg to differ. Finished “community films” exist only on the outer-most fringes of the film industry—assuming someone remembered to create IMDb entries for them, as promised to many a cast and crew, in lieu of a paycheck. This speaks to the economic impact of such projects; there is none—people can’t pay rent or buy groceries with deferred salaries.
Despite the excitement they tend to engender in the local film community—I don’t think community films actually benefit anyone. To be frank, I think that they do more harm than good. Exploited actors and crew are prevented from learning the actual value of their time and talent. They become so accustomed to “donating” or underbidding their services and paying the “passion tax” that when they’re presented with an offer that industry veterans would scoff at, they accept it without question or even any negotiating on their behalf by their so-called “agents”—because 15% of a lousy offer is still better than 15% of a client’s “experience” and IMDb credit. This undermines the income potential for other local actors and crew. A desperate labor market attracts predatory employers. While some may be quick to point fingers at incentivized productions hiring local background talent for less than half of what SAG-AFTRA deems as an acceptable minimum day rate, some Utah-based producers, including the working amateurs described above, also exploit that desperation. While it might be good for their bottom line in the short term, the practice is simply not sustainable.
The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and—especially where guest posts are concerned—do not necessarily reflect the official policies and/or practice of the Utah Filmmakers™ Association, its officers and/or associates.
In the years following my efforts to develop a local television series, I continued to moonlight in the Utah film industry, working in front of and behind the camera on feature films, commercials, corporate productions, and reality series. I also remained involved with the local film community—attending local screenings and meet & greets and participating in the 48-Hour Film Project. All the while, I noted very little crossover between the two. The professionals I worked with were rarely seen at community events, and the locals I recognized—actors mostly—were usually spotted among the extras in productions from outside of Utah. From time to time, I was also recruited to work on locally produced feature films. Still, they often lacked the funding, organization, and discipline I had come to expect from out-of-state productions taking advantage of Utah’s Motion Picture Incentive Program.
During this time, I also continued to work with Ben Hawker, developing the Utah Filmmakers and ActorsFacebook group into a growing professional resource that remained welcoming and instructive for beginners.
For a few years, starting in 2014, I was hired by Ben Fuller through mediaRif as an Assistant Director for a Utah State Fair ad campaign featuring local comedian Steve Soelberg. During one of our initial conversations, Ben told me that I was one of the few people he knew that has one foot planted in the film industry and the other in the local film community. Having never heard it articulated by anyone else, this casual observation confirmed what I had been witnessing. At this point, a new mission for the Utah Filmmakers™ Association began to crystalize, most easily summarized by what would become the organization’s vision statement: “Bridging the local film community with Utah’s film industry.”
The question remained: how does Utah Filmmakers™ help facilitate a community filmmaker’s transition to becoming an industry professional?
The answer would present itself in the core values adopted by the organization: Professionalism, Integrity, and Respect. These would inform a Code of Ethics & Conduct and become the guiding principles for Hawker’s Facebook group as it was adopted by—and subsequently named for—Utah Filmmakers™, becoming its official online forum.
The UFA™ Ethics Code offers local filmmakers—industry veterans and beginners alike—a standard to strive for. These basic parameters were written so anyone can apply them—in any vocation—to mitigate problematic behaviors and questionable business practices like those I have experienced and observed many others continuing to experience.
There’s a long, sad history of young creatives with a sincere desire to become industry professionals being exploited. The most common unethical and illegal practice they fall victim to is wage theft. Trite justifications along the lines of “paying one’s dues,” appealing to artistic “passion,” and even ham-fisted justifications along the lines of, “If I don’t do it, somebody else will” have proven effective in the short term for the completion of commercial enterprises like made-for-cable movies, commercials, and corporate videos—the latter of which represents a significant portion of Utah’s production work—to mostly unwatchable “passion projects” that are “made in Utah” by “local filmmakers.” The generally poor production quality of these independent films stands out considerably when compared to that of other, more successful films and series that are “made in Utah” by out-of-state production companies taking advantage of the aforementioned Motion Picture Incentive.
The reasons behind the disparity in quality are painfully obvious yet continue to be ignored. Many locally produced narrative projects—from short films to features and series pilots—have developed an unfortunate habit of cutting corners to just “get it done.” I’ve been involved in several of these projects, mostly in the lower echelons of the production, seeing poor decisions being made, not because the filmmakers don’t know any better but because they feel that they have no choice. Even when I’ve found myself above the line, able to identify potential problems and offer solutions to avoid them, I’ve run into the same problems. Resources that could have been better invested in more comprehensive preproduction and paying ALL cast and crew fair wages are reserved for only the most “essential” of department heads, with the remainder wasted on submission fees to major festivals with little chance of acceptance, and familiar-sounding, online-only “awards” competitions, “geographically” adjacent to—but lacking any endorsement and often even direct knowledge of—the established and reputable festivals whose coattails they’re attempting to ride with their confusingly similar branding. Oftentimes, the most that any filmmaker will get for their trouble is access to festival laurels in the form of digital assets—typically bearing the description “official selection,” which might as well just say “participant.” These graphics are incorporated into amateur-looking movie posters with the interminable false hope of getting a lucrative distribution deal.
Ultimately, many of these films remain unsaleable, lacking the deliverables that serious distributors require—like a clearly defined chain of title, signed contracts, and other industry-standard due diligence. Eventually, they may only be “released” on Vimeo or YouTube or relegated to obscure streaming services appealing to a tiny fraction of a minuscule audience. At best, they are buried along with similar sub-par content on wider-reaching platforms, available to rent for a few dollars—the lion's share of which is collected by the platform, leaving a few cents per view for whichever “creator” signed their virtual signature on the dotted line; but they do so with pride, having achieved something they can refer to—at least technically—as “distribution.” In reality, it’s the film industry equivalent to self-publishing a novel—a service that is also offered by the parent companies of at least two of the larger streaming platforms.
Do such projects ever see a return on their investment? Not to my knowledge, but that doesn’t stop the personalities behind them from launching another crowdfunding campaign with a “flexible” goal, “From the producers of…” that other local film potential backers may have heard of but probably didn’t watch, even if they received an “Associate Producer” credit for their last $100 contribution.
Does anyone actually benefit from these productions?
Any “experience” that’s gained by cast and crew is usually in the form of first-hand knowledge of how NOT to manage a film production. This assumes they’ve had the opportunity to work on a competently produced project to which it may be compared.
Do these projects benefit the local film industry? Are they even affiliated with the industry? The word “industry” is literally defined by economic activity. All industries have a quantifiable impact on the economy. Public and private investments are made in determining feasibility, building infrastructure, planning, development, and—most importantly—labor. The film industry is no different.
The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and—especially where guest posts are concerned—do not necessarily reflect the official policies and/or practice of the Utah Filmmakers™ Association, its officers and/or associates.
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