4thWall

Hey Sequence 64!

I hope you are enjoying summer bootcamp!

Alright, first things first, enjoy your time at SU because it flies by. My time with Sequence 63 was amazing, but I literally blinked and it was over. My advice (take it or leave it) is to get involved with the amazing opportunities available at Newhouse, on campus and in the Syracuse community.  My undergraduate degree was not in TV/Film or communications, so I was starting fresh at Newhouse and had one year to soak up all I could.

I worked on four shows for the Orange Television Network (Cook-Ease, Cook-Ease Presents Reel Old Movies, Campus Crush & The Review Crew), working in various roles. I edited for the Syracuse Film Festival, as well as Starfish International, an educational program for girls in West Africa.

I could not stress how much the experience gained through the above activities helped me with the transition to the working world. Studying concepts in class is great, but putting them into practice is even better. Learning first hand makes things stick. Having this background and these experiences enabled me to land two internships in Los Angeles for the summer.

So as corny as it sounds, grab a friend (or a stranger, they will be your friend sooner or later) and GET INVOLVED! Good luck Sequence 64 and hopefully I will meet some of you when you make the journey out to the West Coast!

It feels weird giving advice to Sequence 64 because I definitely don’t have ANY real answers just yet — I’m still new to LA, and I’m still trying to figure it all out myself.  In this volatile industry, where there’s so much to learn, I’m not sure I’m ever going to have the answers. So, for this post, I’m going to pass along a few bits of advice that I’ve been given from people in the industry, since I’ve been out here:

Pick a job you want to do, and tell everyone about it:  People in the business really will want to help you if you’re good at what you do, are hard working, and fun to be around.  People will want to help you especially if they think that someday you might be in a position to help them. However, no one can help you unless they know where you’re trying to go and what you’re trying to do. Sound definitive in your answer– its okay if your answer changes down the road.  Sounding definitive will give others confidence in you and your abilities.

You have to pay your dues:  The reality is that we’re not going to just waltz into the industry and become producers or directors right away. And we are not “too good” to fetch coffee and make copies, even though we have Masters Degrees. Everyone starts at the bottom in this business, so do it willingly, and even offer to do “the shit work” from time to time.  Do it with a smile on your face. Fake eagerness for it if you have to. It will show your employers that you understand the process and that you’re willing to make sacrifices to get where you want to be.

Stay loyal, but not too loyal:  Switching from job to job is how you move up, both in salary and in title.  If you stay at one company for too long, people will begin only seeing you in that one role—whatever it may be.  If you love the company you work for, great, and if you can move up there, even greater—but it might be a quicker process for you if you leave that company for a while and then come back in a different role. If you stay stagnant at one company, it will make other people think you’re incapable of working anywhere else, in any other roles. When you do get a chance to get out there and switch companies, try and work on a bunch of different projects until you find your niche; to have cooking shows, game shows, talk shows, documentaries, etc, under your belt, will make you an ideal candidate down the road for any project that may come up through the woodwork.

Hollywood (and the entertainment industry in general) is smaller than you think: Everyone knows everyone (or at least knows someone who does).  Make sure that every single person you meet has a positive impression of you, because people talk, and people in Hollywood talk A LOT. People hire their friends, and hire them over and over again. So, especially with our small group of 40 or so, we have to stick together out here in the real world. I know we’re all competitive with each other, but we have to be supportive of each other too. Favors will be repaid in this business, so keep your ties close, and make a conscious effort to keep connected to one another for the long-haul.

Hard work doesn’t go unnoticed:  Work your ass off each and every day.  Even if you don’t get formally recognized for it, people are going to remember you for your work ethic, and your work ethic is going to be what gets you a job down the road.

My last piece of advice:  the real world isn’t as scary as it seems. Make the leap!

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.

To Sequence 64:

Enjoy it while you can.  Have fun.  These people will become your family for a year.  You’ll be pouring your sweat and blood into projects together, spending late nights in the editing suites or in the studio, and not sleeping together.

The most important piece of advice I can give to anyone is for whatever you want to do, keep doing it.  If you want to be a director, don’t stop directing, do as much of it as you can while you have the free equipment and the friends you can draft into being producers, editors, cast, etc.  If you want to write, keep writing.  Don’t wait for an assignment to come up in class before you write something.  If you want to be a producer, produce stuff.  Don’t wait for an assignment.  Yes, classes are important, but take advantage of the resources at your disposal.  You are paying a lot of money for the right to the Cage and the edit suites, use them!

If your sequence is anything like our sequence, you’ll have a broad range of people around you, with different goals and interests.  These are people you’ll want to keep in touch with long term, so don’t just shut yourself in your apartment to study, study with friends.  Develop working relationships with people you like.  Someday you may be in a job where your bosses are looking for someone, you can suggest someone who is not only talented and qualified, but who you’ll enjoy working with.

To make the most of TRF, just work on whatever sort of projects you’re passionate about, and make sure you cultivate relationships with your classmates.