What if there was a way to cut filmmaking costs, while empowering every member of your cast and crew with the promise of equality, transparency, vested interest and potential pay on the backend? Oscar-nominated Sing Sing filmmaking duo Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley are doing just that, with a plan that could save independent filmmaking and even disrupt the entire industry. They created Ethos — their equal pay initiative that also pays back investors, cast and crew in a way that brings everyone into a form of partnership — and they want to share it with the industry.
Kwedar and Bentley began making features with Transpecos, directed by Kwedar, then Jockey, directed by Bentley, then the Kwedar-directed Sing Sing led by Colman Domingo. Next, they have Train Dreams, starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones.
The idea for Ethos came “starting with everybody’s going to get paid the same rates,” says Bentley. “Then it got more exciting, thinking about the creative equity side of independent film and cleaning that up in the same way that the investor side is very clean, and standardizing it to where it can be as transparent as possible. Everybody knows where everybody stands.” He calls this “a lightbulb moment. You’re actually telling cast and crew that there is going to be money, even if there’s no profit. There’s going to be something. It might just be a little bit, but there’s going to be something that comes back to you from this. It’s an ownership mindset.”
“We also knew the way we made Transpecos didn’t really yield a success for our investors or ourselves,” Kwedar says. “We hadn’t seen any profit from it. Our investors hadn’t been made whole. So, we were like, ‘We have to figure out how to lower the risk, but we don’t want to just make a cheaper film.’ We wanted to actually push the quality further but make it for less money. And so that was like, OK, well now we need a new paradigm.”
Bentley lays it out as a three-tenet plan. The first is equitable pay structure. “Everybody is paid the same rate from the writer, director, the star all the way through the PA, and then all the way through post as well.” Everyone is paid according to the time they put in. “Nobody has a bonus that everybody else isn’t privy to. It’s standardized.”
The second tenet is standardizing the equity. “The only differential is how long you work on the movie. So, everybody who qualifies, who works a minimum amount, is party to the backend equity of the film on the creative side.”
The third point is, Bentley says, “Finding a way to split money off the gross rather than the net of the film with cast and crew.”
Kwedar explains how this worked on Jockey as an example. “The first money that comes in — that normally would just recoup the investors plus 120% and then you split the profit 50/50. That’s the standard waterfall. We changed the waterfall for first money to come in, we would split 60% to investors, 40% to cast and crew, until the investors got 120% back. And then we split it 50/50 in perpetuity. If the movie was just a modest success or only got a small minimum guarantee from a distributor, we would still have something to share with the cast and crew for that sweat equity.” The trade-off to the investors, Kwedar adds is, “Well, you didn’t have to put up as much money as you normally would to pay for this film, and so this is what we need to do to reward the artists involved.”
Bentley acknowledges this doesn’t work for everyone. “There were some crew who were like, ‘Listen, I have to make a certain amount for my family and I can’t take that hit.’ Some investors pushed back, but “I think that’s a testament to Black Bear that they were on Sing Sing, but we didn’t have as hard of a time on Sing Sing because we had proved [the concept].” One actor’s representative was very reticent. But after Jockey became a success, “They got nice checks. And that rep was like, ‘Oh my god, what a beautiful film.’”
Says Kwedar, “For Colman on Sing Sing, “It was a chance to be involved in building something from the ground up, or a prestige role that could have awards potential.” The actor was indeed Oscar nominated.
They hope Ethos could “matriculate in the broader industry” Kwedar says. They’re also raising money. “Ideally movies on the Sing Sing scale that traditionally would be $5 million, you can make for under $2 million on a model like this, or first features like Jockey that normally you would make for $1.5 million, you can make for under half a million because of a parity structure model. We want to fully finance those films.”
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