Perhaps the biggest highlight of interning at Mandalay Pictures is the “Executive Lecture Series”. Over the course of two months, my fellow interns and I had the opportunity to interact with various executives one on one. Not only did we learn how they had come to where they are now but we were also advised on how we could possibly pursue our individual career plans, sort of on the lines of a mentoring session. Amongst those who spoke to us, I followed up with personal meetings to go a step further and be “counseled” by Mandalay’s President Cathy Schulman, Executive Vice President Peter Strauss and Vice President of Business Administrations, Michelle Hastings. Most executives at Mandalay would make the time for you if you let their assistants know you need their advice. And the great thing about the office was that the executives didn’t sit locked up in their rooms. You turned a corner and there they were, happy to say hello and ask you what your day had been like so far.
Coming back to the lecture series, there was so much discussed during these sessions that we hung on to each sentence with rapt attention even avoiding taking notes in some instances so that we wouldn’t miss out on some great chunk of industry info. Since this blog is all about sharing our experiences and forwarding any valuable knowledge gained from our internships, I went ahead and put down a few anecdotes from some of those lectures at Mandalay. They are more or less accounts of trends developing in the motion picture industry. Thought sharing this might give you, the TRF 64 batch an idea of how things have evolved and what trends persist at the moment when it comes to the movie business in Hollywood, straight from the horse’s mouth.
Cathy Schulman, Academy-award winning producer of ‘Crash’ was the first to speak to us. She also happens to be the President of ‘Women in Films’. Cathy explained to us that when she started her career, studios weren’t vertically integrated and hence more ‘indie’ genre of films with a wider range of interesting stories were being made. However, now that studios are vertically integrated, they want to finance movies with IP value, essentially stories that can be turned into franchise models (Part 1, 2 3 and so on) and those that make it easy for studios to earn revenue from merchandising, gaming etc based on the movies’ characters. This results in studios often shirking producers as sellers of stories because producers and marketers have conflicting interests. Cathy also told us what we would go on to hear several more times from numerous other assistants and executives here. In case you want to become a Development Executive or even a Producer, starting out at an agency is a fast way to grow and if the agency route doesn’t work for some, then make sure you work in a place that is active vis-à-vis the industry.
In a couple of days, Peter Strauss, Executive Vice President of Mandalay spoke to the interns. Peter told us about the “three legged stool” financing pattern for films. Movies bring in their money from foreign sales, subsidies (taxes and rebates) and equity. The challenge is to reduce the equity component to the lowest level and get more financing coming in from subsidies like say tax cuts from filming locations (many states offer attractive discounts to filmmakers) and foreign sales. I also learned that in the independent world of financing (which deals with lower budgets and non-traditional release patterns of films) a movie doesn’t get distributed until it is seen.
There were more lectures where I picked up on things that I knew little of like the steps producers take to achieve financing, the different deals that studios forge with production companies and then production companies forge with writers/talent. Terms like “letter of credit” and“production insurance” that had been touched upon in my Film Business class were now being explained to me here, at a company that is actively developing multiple films in Hollywood by the executives themselves! I could go on and on with more stuff that I learnt and bore you guys more but the truth is that if you are even a little curious about development or producing as I am , you will probably be finding all this out for yourself and even more in a year’s time at your internships. So look out for internships that are related to your long term career interests or at least those that promise to make the months you spend there a rich learning experience.