Will The Great Chill Freeze Jane's Film?
More Heterodox Filmmakers Are Investigating Substack
Dear Coddling Movie Community,
Our team is eager to help an anxious generation find happiness, and so we’re doing our best to bring The Coddling Movie to as wide of an audience as possible.
We’re especially interested in reaching Gen Zers and their parents, and we’re grateful to the paid subscribers who support those efforts. (By the way, we’ll soon be making another exciting distribution-related announcement.)
But we also have another goal: We hope to help pave the way for other heterodox filmmakers to reach large audiences.
And I’m pleased to report that our Substack experiment has been attracting quite a bit of attention from filmmakers, including an Oscar winner, an Emmy winner, and another whose work has been praised by many of the most prestigious outlets.
In this essay, I tell the story of one prominent filmmaker who has contacted us.
“Jane’s” case study shows why filmmakers and film lovers need a platform that supports viewpoint diversity and free expression.
All the best,
Ted
All the right people loved Jane’s first feature film.
It challenged powerful interests, and that made it controversial. It won one of the industry’s top awards and attracted lavish praise from outlets like The New York Times, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter. One of the best-known distributors purchased the film, which went on to reach a huge audience.
Then “Jane” made another movie.
It too challenged powerful interests, but it challenged powerful interests the entertainment industry supports. That made Jane’s new film “problematic.” The same industry that embraced Jane’s last film has thus far shunned her new project. If the shunning continues, this time there will be no fancy awards, no gushing media attention, and no lucrative distribution deal.
The Braun Rule strikes again.
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I named the Braun Rule after film industry heavyweight Josh Braun, and it paraphrases what the Oscar-winning gatekeeper said publicly: The entertainment industry prefers controversial films over problematic ones, even if they’re good.
Jane and other filmmakers who have endured the Braun Rule have begun to reach out to Courtney and me to ask us about our experiment in film distribution. The Coddling of the American Mind is the very first “Substack presents” feature film, and our Substack release is an important component of a first-of-its-kind film release, which also includes a global tour.
The entertainment industry’s cowardice and conformity has created a silver lining. It’s created an entrepreneurial opportunity for heterodox filmmakers and platforms like Substack that support intellectual diversity and free speech.
But dissident filmmakers who continue releasing films the traditional way will have to deal with the Braun Rule. And that doesn’t mean the industry wants anodyne movies. Being offensive could be a boon to your film.
Just make sure to be correctly offensive.