Liberating Filmmakers: Why We’re Releasing Our Movie on Substack
The story behind "The Coddling of the American Mind" - Part 3
Dear Readers,
This is the third installment of a three-part series. Here are the first two installments:
Part 1: Filmmaking During the Great Chill
Part 2: Attack of the Eight Percenters
For those who haven’t read the first two parts, I’ll clarify some terms:
“The Great Chill” — You’re probably familiar with the term “chilling effect,” and that’s mostly what I mean here. “Cancel culture” gets all the press, but The Great Chill probably makes more mischief.
“Eight Percenters” is what I call the industry gatekeepers who stand between filmmakers and audiences. I call them Eight Percenters because they are very likely to hail from the Progressive Activist Tribe, one of America’s seven hidden tribes identified in Hidden Tribes, a report by the British organization More in Common. The Progressive Activist tribe enjoys outsized cultural influence, but represents only eight percent of America.
This is the most important term! “Courtney” is my wife and producing partner Courtney Moorehead Balaker. We make feature films and other content under the banner of our own company, Korchula Productions, and for others. We also consult on film and television projects and host filmmaker workshops. When we make documentaries, I direct and she produces. And when we make narrative films, we flip it. Courtney directs and I produce.
All the best,
Ted
“It’ll piss off viewers.”
We had heard that same line from two influential entertainment industry gatekeepers, and who knows how many more were thinking it?
That’s how it goes with The Great Chill.
You have the seen and the unseen, and the unseen—that subtle chill—is almost certainly more pernicious. Countless people gobble up social media, pick up on social cues, make calculations about job security and friendships, and then act accordingly. Any individual action may be tiny, but the accumulated effect creates a timid culture.
Josh Braun, probably the most influential sales agent in the doc world, said what many of his colleagues were thinking. The industry shies away from “problematic” films, even if they’re good.
We experienced the chill many times ourselves and have commiserated with friends who felt the freeze. Our latest film, The Coddling of the American Mind, tackles the Gen Z mental health crisis and aims to help that anxious generation find happiness.
It’s based on the bestselling book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. But maybe none of that matters. Courtney and I soon realized we were pitching a problematic film to industry gatekeepers who didn’t want problems.
And that’s not all.
Licensing agreements with streamers like Netflix and Prime Video, which had been so important to our other films, were drying up—not just for problematic filmmakers, for everybody.
Add to that Hollywood’s long relationship with risk aversion, which can be summarized with the old saw: Nobody gets fired for saying no.
Job security often means passing on projects. So where would that leave our film?
Finding Eyeballs
An indie film’s path to viewers often looks like this:
Festivals
Theaters
Streamers
Miscellaneous (TV, in-flight entertainment, public libraries, private organizations, universities, and so on)
We had good reason to believe the first three options would be dead ends or close to it.
Even option 4 would be tough. Take universities. Although our films have screened on hundreds of college campuses, we are almost never invited by any official arm of any university administration. One university president even issued a public statement that detailed how a screening of our 2016 film Can We Take a Joke? supposedly traumatized his campus.
Yes, The Coddling of the American Mind had already pissed off some viewers, but you can’t please everyone. And despite unfriendly market forces and Eight Percenter myopia, we knew our film had an audience.
We had seen the enthusiastic reactions from intellectually diverse audiences at sneak peek screenings across the nation. We’d heard from parents, professors, and students who embraced the film. In anonymous questionnaires, undergrads’ most common responses to the film clustered around synonyms for “truthful” and "stimulating.”
One 19-year-old woman wrote: “Bold, important, honest. Risky, but needs to be shared.”
We were trying to share the movie, but we weren’t quite sure how.
Liberating Filmmakers
Then things finally took a turn for the better.
We learned that a respected distributor known for representing socially conscious Sundance films loved our film. The execs acknowledged it would piss off some viewers, but only some of them. And remarkably, at least one staffer had actually read Greg and Jon’s book.
So many gatekeepers were freezing us out, yet somehow we landed with a top-tier distributor. We exhaled, and then contacted our lawyers.
We started going back and forth on the details of the distribution contract. During that process, I kept thinking about what I had learned from knocking around on my little corner of Substack. I had, ever so cautiously, launched Shiny Herd in order to understand and explain industry groupthink.
Through my Shiny Herd experience, I learned that Substack attracted a community of tens of millions of subscribers. And the platform seemed fiercely committed to artistic freedom and free speech.
And this wasn’t the “free speech for me, but not for thee” crowd. Subtack attracted an intellectually diverse community. I noticed that Shiny Herd had lots of audience overlap with The Free Press, Persuasion, and Racket News, outlets that were headed by prominent left-leaning writers. It made sense because, as I noted in Part 1 of this essay, six of America’s seven hidden tribes have quite a bit in common when it comes to hot-button issues like free speech.
Plenty of successful writers had freed themselves from a big, oppressive industry to start their own Substacks, and it seemed to be working for them. They had connected with audiences, and created—what appeared from the outside at least—sustainable business models.
All that sounded great to Courtney and me. We also wanted to free ourselves from a big, oppressive industry. And how wonderful it would be to sidestep industry middlemen, and connect directly with audiences.
Hmmm.
Courtney and I met with Substack co-founders Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie, and delivered this pitch: Substack has liberated writers. Now it’s time to liberate filmmakers.
Why not make The Coddling of the American Mind the very first “Substack presents” feature documentary?
In order to make it work, the platform would have to add new features. And if the experiment succeeded, it could help advance our goal of helping anxious and depressed Gen Zers find happiness.
The Substack experiment might also make an impact beyond our project. The film industry’s cowardice and conformity offered an entrepreneurial opportunity. If the status quo was slow to serve the vast majority of Americans who craved riskier fare, then maybe Substack could step in.
We benefited from the moving-picture pioneers who came before us, and hoped our experiment would help pave the way for other heterodox filmmakers to reach large, intellectually diverse audiences.
Chris and Hamish embraced the idea. Then they and their team rat-tat-tatted many more ideas we had never even considered.
We were thrilled, but we quickly realized we had to get down to business.
We had to figure out how to mix Substack’s capabilities with a traditional indie rollout that included a limited theatrical release, streaming, and so on.
But the more we thought about it, the more we wondered—why theaters?
They demand huge revenue cuts, and marketing costs (which filmmakers pay for one way or another) take another big bite of the pie. That means theatrical runs are almost always money losers for indies. They’re more likely to function as commercials for the next step in the distribution process, which is usually a streaming release.
But why should we prioritize streamers?
They’re getting stingier with licensing deals, and they seem committed to turning Idiocracy into a documentary. Unless you come to them with a celebrity, a murder, or a celebrity murder, they’re probably not interested.
Other market forces push films toward ad-based or pay-per-view models, also known as Transactional VOD or simply “TVOD.” Even films sporting big shot actors and directors were ending up on these paths.
But why should we follow them?
Those routes also required filmmakers to hand over huge revenue cuts in exchange for roughly zero flexibility or creativity. All you can do is throw your baby into the cloud, and hope it doesn’t get lost in the algorithm.
Courtney and I had figured out a way to make the clunky system work, but what if Substack was offering something better?
If we were going to take the plunge, we wanted to do it right. We decided to part ways with our distributor and jump into the Substack experiment with both feet.
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Our Substack Experiment
We had only four months until our premiere and that time would be packed with Zoom meetings, tech tests, and long email chains with many talented people from Team Substack.
Courtney and I learned how to engage with the community, and Substack built new features, including payment options, for our film. A big challenge was melding Substack’s subscription-based writers’ platform with film viewer’s expectations. Viewers aren’t used to “subscribing” to feature films, so innovative features like group discounts are slow to catch on.
And, alas, there is no Substack smart TV app (at least not yet). Yes, there are ways to cast to Apple TVs and other smart TVs, but for many, the process is not as convenient as logging onto Netflix or Prime Video from Roku.
We expected there to be some cons, and there were. But they were far outweighed by the pros.
By releasing our film on Substack, Courtney and I enjoyed more of what most independent filmmakers want.
Take artistic freedom.
Skittish studio execs feared our movie would piss off viewers, alienate corporate sponsors, and ignite a social media backlash. Yet they still invited us to “continue the conversation.” We can only imagine how they might have mangled the film, but Substack never asked us to change a single frame. Artistic freedom was always a given.
Or take audience.
The Substack community offers a good fit for indie films. It seems a little like an arthouse theater audience—educated, curious, engaged and welcoming of nuance. It skews younger than the arthouse crowd, and my guess is it’s more intellectually diverse.
And, of course, economics always looms large.
Substack takes 10 percent of revenue on top of Stripe processing fees. That’s a far better split than what filmmakers can expect from theaters, streamers, or distributors.
And it’s fairly easy to supplement subscription revenue by, say, selling merchandise. Looking for a Coddling movie poster, a “stop scrolling!” smartphone cover, or a onesie for your antifragile baby? We’ve got you covered.
Substack also offers plenty of flexibility.
Movie theaters offer matinee discounts, and entrepreneurs have found some clever ways to bring a splash of variable pricing to a rigid system. But on Substack, we can meet a wide range of film fans wherever they are. We offer options far below the cost of a movie ticket ($8 to rent the movie for a month and free subscribers get access to public posts) and far above (including $80 for a yearlong subscription where viewers have access to the movie, bonus content, chats, and other perks like free tickets to special events). Founding Members (and we love ‘em!) pay even more ($240). They realize that their generosity supercharges our efforts to reach more viewers.
As an independent filmmaker, it’s quite a thrill to see people pay $80 or $240 for your movie. Of course, they’re purchasing much more than the movie, and that highlights an important trade off. It takes a lot of time and effort to produce bonus content, write posts, and so on. That might not appeal to some filmmakers, but my hunch is that many will embrace that tradeoff.
A film that takes years to make can be gone in 90 minutes, and filmmakers often look for ways to deepen and extend the lives of their movies. That makes the subscription model an enticing option.
Although a great deal of the Substack experience has been completely new to us, it’s also given us the opportunity to add on to what we were already planning to do. For instance, we pair our films with educational impact campaigns, which include campus screenings and special events. It requires plenty of additional resources to report on our events or record them for subscribers, but we’re happy to do it.
Going Live
Our official release began when a raucous audience of about 400 people turned out for our February 21 premiere in Beverly Hills. At midnight the film began streaming exclusively on Substack, and that day we launched our nationwide tour.
The first screening took place that evening in the Bay Area at Cal State Maritime. We participated in that Q&A, and various others including at UCLA and Cal State San Luis Obispo.
Next month Courtney and I head East for screenings at Harvard, Cornell, Wake Forest, and Princeton.
On April 18, we’ll host a special event screening in New York that features Jonathan Haidt. We’ll offer free tickets to some subscribers, and throughout our journey we’ll include other ways for subscribers to experience the tour virtually and in-person. We’ve already published some event recaps, meetups are in the works, and we’ll be resurrecting DVD extras.
We’ve learned that Subtack offers many other ways to publicize a film and stretch its impact beyond its run time. The Free Press released our official trailer and our film landed on Substack Reads. We’ve been interviewed by Substack outlets ranging from The Same Drugs with Meghan Murphy to How To Subvert Subversion with Yuri Bezmenov and (coming soon!) The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum.
Viewers may continue the journey by subscribing to newsletters penned by Team Coddling’s Kimi Katiti, Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, and yours truly.
Smart Move?
If we hadn’t swerved toward Substack, our film’s first stop would have been a limited theatrical release. So at this stage, Courtney and I compare that to our actual first step (streaming exclusively on Substack).
We’re only a few weeks into our release. But based on what we know so far, we absolutely made the right choice.
Our financial situation is far better than it would have been, and that’s just the beginning. Film industry accounting is notoriously opaque, but based on our best guesses, we’ve probably out performed plenty of recent feature docs that have been produced and released by some of the most prestigious names in the business.
Of course, we don’t know what the future holds, but we figure our Substack experiment has placed us in a much better position to make the most of the next steps in our distribution journey. Now the cluster of streaming and TVOD options make more sense. After all, we have nearly 6,000 subscribers (and counting) who, if we ask nicely, might help us reach many more viewers.
But if your top priority is getting “Hollywood” rich, you wouldn’t launch a film production company with the mission “making important ideas entertaining.” Courtney got her start in movies producing horror films, and if we were consumed with making money, we probably would have continued along that bloody path.
But, like many indie filmmakers, we regard our profession as a vocation. And that makes us even more keen on our Subtack experiment.
For instance, our paid subscribers subsidize our nonprofit impact campaign. They’re helping us reach audiences at universities and other venues all over the nation. Our movie has screened or is booked at 37 locations, and dozens more are in the works.
Our distribution journey has been an exhausting one, but it’s also been peppered with bursts of exhilaration. Consider what happened last week at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
A crowd of undergrads lined up to watch the movie. During the screening, they heard from our lovable Gen Z interview subjects who had fallen into darkness. They tangled with anxiety and depression, but eventually pulled themselves into the light.
They showed audience members how they can find happiness too. They explained that Gen Zers shouldn’t listen to those who tell them they’re fragile.
The Gen Z mental health crisis didn’t start on college campuses, but campus is where adults have, often unwittingly, taught young people to be miserable. But last Friday night, something very different happened.
Roughly 150 college students shoehorned themselves into a campus screening room to learn that they’re stronger than strong. They’re antifragile.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and the new feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Stream it here.
The film is outstanding and much needed. My compliments and a big thank you to all involved.
A film like this gives me hope. And reminds me that the MSM propganda is just that, propaganda.