she asked for checks. She tells her students what it was like to raise capital before the emergence of online crowd-funding sites: “It was embarrassing and scary. It was really hard and lonely and it felt bad. It sucked.” Now she’s using the tools available online. “Kickstarter is the best thing ever,” she says. Rachel Is was screened internationally and won best documentary at the Thin Line Documentary Film Festival and the Athens International Film Festival.
Iris Cahn ’76
ROUGHING IT Harris wrote and directed his first feature, Redlegs, in 2012, a film made on a micro-budget that he compares to “the cost of a new, but not terribly classy, sedan. “We have fights, we have cars, we have guns. It doesn’t feel like a lot of $30,000 movies, but that came at a cost—real subterfuge, and deceit, and planning. Begging forgiveness instead of asking permission. Those are things you have to actually learn—how to make something effectively on a low budget. It’s always been part of the ethos of what you get from this program,” Harris believes. That ethos is sure to continue now that he’s returned to Purchase to teach Senior Production: Filmmaking. Of the best film programs in the U.S., only a scant few are found at public institutions. Purchase College offers undeniable advantages: conservatory training at the cost of a state school, with access and exposure to academic excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. Cahn says she loves the egalitarian nature of Purchase. “There’s something wonderful about the fact that state schools are accessible—affordable—to a far larger group of kids than private institutions,” she says. Like other faculty members, Cahn notes that Purchase tends to draw the resourceful and crafty students— “students with an intense work ethic who don’t mind staying up all night in the freezing cold to help one another on a shoot.” According to Workman, “We get a tremendously rich mix of students. These are very different kids, in terms of their backgrounds, but we find that they want to help each other. I don’t think we have as many dilettantes, those passing through a film program until they do something else, because they’re not necessarily the rich kids.” The need to secure financing is a reality in filmmaking and proves to be a daunting task for many artists. Glynn raised money for her first feature, a critically acclaimed documentary about her developmentally disabled sister called Rachel Is, the old-fashioned way:
Tomlin was an early adopter of the crowd-funding sites. “My time outside the arts at Purchase was studying marketing and history. Through the viral marketing and, later, social media marketing classes that began, I learned how to raise what has accumulated into $50,000 for film projects,” he says. He credits his early Kickstarter campaign, as well as the assistance of his graduating class, as critical components in the completion of his feature film Solomon Grundy. At AFI, he’s working on Persuasion, a film about a father facing difficulty parenting his young son, whose burgeoning power of persuasion is growing out of control.
A FILM MUST HAVE AN AUDIENCE The New York Times reviewed nearly 900 movies that were released in 2013, which represents a small fraction of the films actually made. Sundance received 325 feature film submissions in 1994. In 2014, it received 4,057 and screened only 118, or about 3 percent. Harris often writes about the intersection of film and economics and offers his perspective on the industry. “So it’s supply and demand. Clearly, there’s so much supply that the value of all these movies just completely flattens out and dissipates, except for the big hits—the Supermans and Star Wars…the recycled, regurgitated narratives,” he says. Once the values drop, distributors spend less, leaving a smallerthan-ever slice of the financial pie for those people in “above-theline” positions such as writers, producers, and directors, who aren’t paid a day rate to make the films. “So what that really means is that independent film for the people who do above-the-line work is no longer a middle-class job,” Harris explains. Even when films do find audiences, the financial rewards sometimes fall below expectations. Glynn was thrilled to hear that her documentary Rachel Is will air nationally on PBS. The amount she was paid for it, though—$4,000—left her a bit disheartened. “When my distributor told me that, I thought I misunderstood him. It’s great that we’re finally getting the film shown to a U.S. audience, but the film represents the work of my twenties. So that’s the world that we live in. I don’t really understand….” She trails off. Chaiken agrees there’s an industry-wide problem. “Since I made my first feature on Super 16 mm, which we shot in 1999, the advent of new digital technology has made it so much cheaper and more accessible to so many more people, which is great. But the downside is that the glut of smaller films has made it hard for many filmmakers to get attention, and if they do, they are not expected to make their money back or gain any income from their product.” The goal shared by all filmmakers—admittedly an obvious one—is that they want their movies to be seen. Glynn is buoyed by the validation she gets from an increased audience. “I want people to see my movies. It just makes it easier to live when it’s not all uphill.” Her next film, Inside Out, explores the rela-
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