Women in Film Spotlight: Emily Best
Or Die Trying executive producers Sarah Hawkins and Myah Hollis caught up Seed&Spark founder, Emily Best, to talk about her unique crowdfunding platform, independent filmmaking, and combating the gender gap in Hollywood.
Emily Best speaking at The Conference in Malmo, Sweden.
ODT: How did you begin to establish yourself in the women in film community?
Emily Best: Not on purpose - I was trying to establish a community of my own. I moved to LA in January of 2014, and I needed to find an anchor here. While at Sundance (just two weeks after I moved), I met Rose McGowan, who had just premiered her short "Dawn," and was talking about wanting to work with more women in key positions. She asked me to introduce her to some more female producers and DPs, and when I started sending intro emails, I realized everyone was in LA. So I just invited everyone over to my apartment one day in February to screen Dawn. I sent an invite to 13 women and 26 women RSVP’d.
It turned into an old fashioned salon - we spent most of the time talking as a group about the challenges and opportunities of our business and how we could be helpful to one another. At the end of the evening, everyone agreed we should do it again the following month. That's how the Women in Moving Pictures Salon was born. Yeah, the acronym is WIMPS, but we own it, and the "i" now stands for Intersectionality, which we discuss a lot and take very seriously. The group is made up of so many diverse opinions, professions, and strengths. Everyone really strives to listen, hold one another accountable, and sit at that sometimes uncomfortable intersection of disagreement.
After two full years, it's a google group of over 1800 women, now all across the country, who use the list to hire one another at the rate of probably 5 per day. It's actively changing the ratio.
ODT: What obstacles did you face while starting your business? How did you overcome them?
EB: I mean, this could be a book-length answer. Starting a business is really just a series of obstacles. Raising money is hard, getting new customers is hard, marketing is hard, human resources is hard...
The only thing that hasn't been hard, miraculously, is finding a team who is passionate about doing this work.
I think the hardest thing to overcome in starting your own business (or making your own film) is your own resistance. You will have to learn to do so, so many things that maybe don't interest you (for some it's bookkeeping, or fundraising, or marketing, or hiring and firing) and you just have to do them. You have to do them because no one else will do them for you. You discover you can be the reason why things aren't happening fast enough. You have to be patient and persistent, relentlessly.
Seed&Spark co-founder, Erica Anderson, teaching at BRIC.
ODT: Seed&Spark has the highest success rate of independent film crowdfunding sites. Why do you think this is?
EB: We focus on educating the filmmakers on how to use crowdfunding as a career-building tool. Our live and online course has a proven track record of increasing campaign success rates. We provide direct, personalized feedback on every project. And we make sure that filmmakers are prepared for success with each project. Then, we do a lot of co-marketing of the projects on our site.
ODT: How have you balanced the relationship between art and business? Where do they intersect in regards to filmmaking, and how do they conflict?
EB: I don't think art and business have to conflict, really ever. There's this idea that if you have to alter your art in any way for business purposes that somehow corrupts the purity of the art, and I call bullshit on that whole paradigm. If you are making moving pictures, you want an audience to watch your work. It's ok to admit that! (And, if you’re just making movies for yourself, I hope you have a big trust fund.) Your audience, and their imaginations, are going to do more than 50% of the work when those moving pictures hit the screen. If you don't have a sense of who wants to watch your work and why, I would argue your "art" will be less effective, and less effectively good. It is possible to have absolute clarity of artistic vision that respects the participation of an audience. And if you are thinking about the audience - how and where they want to watch what you're making - well, that's the business of it.
If you make good business decisions around your art, you get to keep making art. And the wider audience to whom you are directly connected, the more you get to keep control of creative decisions. Filmmakers have this fantasy that someone will pay them to be creative and just take care of the business stuff. Those relationships are the ones in which you end up with the least creative control. Having control over the business side of your art IS having total creative control.
One of Seed&Spark's Bright Ideas Magazine Launch Party.
