Content pfp
Content
@
https://opensea.io/collection/screens-5
0 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
I’ve benefited enormously from the way the system worked. Let’s be honest about that. Independent film—especially anything outside the studio pipeline—was made possible by a strange convergence of European surplus capital, global tax incentives, and Hollywood’s legal-financial scaffolding. It was never advertised as a system, and yet it functioned beautifully, even if no one could fully explain how. I got tax credits. I rode the coattails of French pre-sales. I watched completion bonds come through because some guy in Belgium said yes. There was soft money from Scandinavian funds. There were post-production arbitrage plays—cutting in Berlin, mixing in Montreal, showing in Venice. There were festivals that acted as liquidity hubs and governments that took cultural prestige seriously enough to open their wallets.
1 reply
0 recast
1 reaction
Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
That money—European surplus dollars, Japanese capital allergic to risk—cycled through the dollar system and, through no grand plan, ended up funding independent film. Not just the tasteful awards bait, but the personal, eccentric, totally unmarketable stuff. The kind of movies that wouldn’t survive five minutes in today’s pitch gauntlet. But back then, the world had too much money and not enough imagination on where to put it—so why not give it to filmmakers? It wasn’t logical. But it worked. Often despite itself. And now the alpha’s turned. The flows are reversing. That surplus capital is no longer content to underwrite American scaffolding and California paperwork. The whole ecosystem’s splintering. Whatever this was—this semi-coherent, occasionally brilliant, frequently wasteful mechanism that floated entire careers, mine included—it’s not coming back. At least not in the same form.
0 reply
0 recast
1 reaction