Independent Film Producing: The Outsider's Guide to Producing a First Low Budget Feature Film by Paul Battista (review)

There are many challenges in teaching film production at the college level today. However, one of the biggest is that the headlong rush into personal/guerilla filmmaking (made easier by low-cost tools in production and postproduction) has led to sloppiness in many areas of the process. Our students then take this flawed process with them as they create their own works after they graduate, to sometimes disastrous results. It may be easy to proclaim that sloppiness is an artistic choice in terms of the style of the film (see "mumblecore"), but it is a large danger sign when that same carelessness comes to the legal and professional necessities of planning a feature production.

It is this void that Paul Battista attempts, with varying levels of success, to fill with his book Independent Film Producing: The Outsider's Guide. His general thesis is that ignoring the business of film production keeps independent filmmakers from accomplishing their artistic goals and distributing their films. "Filmmaking, more than any other art form," he writes, "is the fusion of the business and the creative, and the most 'successful' films are the ones where the filmmakers followed their creative instincts while balancing the practical aspects in the process" (37). However, he defines success in a bizarrely narrow manner: "having achieved a completed film that looks like it cost four or five times actual cost" (20). Still, this is a great overall point and one that we, when we are teaching media production, need to be concerned about.

Battista confines his discussion to his definition of an independent film—a narrative/dramatic feature film with a budget between $50,000 and $1 million, made (more or less) under the laws of the State of California, which is a serviceable but incomplete definition for many of us.

The book is generally told in an accessible style, though it often moves into legal jargon that betrays Battista's background as a lawyer (he is also a teacher and a filmmaker himself, having directed, written, and produced a low-budget independent feature—Crooks [2002]). In that area, it falls short of the style and content of The Independent Film Producer's Survival Guide by Gunnar Erickson, Harris Tulchin, and Mark Halloran, though that book is showing its 2002 age.

There is much to be learned from Battista's approach to the preparation and legalities of narrative feature film production. The book divides the process into three areas: developing, producing, and distributing the film. It provides valuable advice on paying a writer (3 to 5 percent of the film's budget), hiring and paying a lawyer (with fees pegged to the total budget), selecting a script that can later be sold to a distributor, and many more issues.

Battista's legal background is extremely valuable when he discusses two large tasks that filmmakers are notoriously terrible at—setting up their businesses and contractual bargaining. As to the first point, the book goes into a detailed discussion of the value of setting up "entities," which are the various forms of companies that are created to separate the business of the film from the individual filmmaker's financial life. The discussion of the differences between limited liability companies, S corporations, and various forms of partnerships and sole proprietorships is illuminating and, even more importantly, clear to a nonlawyer. There is also a very thorough and informative discussion on how filmmakers can write the business plan that they will use to raise money. His detailing of what will and will not help sell the film is clearly borne of years of experience, and it is, perhaps, one of the most valuable parts of the book.

In addition, Battista's discussion of how filmmakers will know when their film is ready to be made should be required reading for all first-time filmmakers, who tend to jump into the production of their films with more...