Civial Capital CEO Peter McDonnell explains, "Until now, only large corporations or high net worth individuals have been able to invest in movies. Hollywood has been a clubhouse and regular people or 'civilians' have always been considered the outsiders. We want to change that."
The financing of "Billy Dead" as a public offering marks the first time an undertaking such as this has been done in the United States. I spoke with director Keith Gordon about this new approach to movie financing while the director was busy promoting "The Singing Dectective." Gordon spoke frankly about this approach, and offered up some news on other possible future projects.
You're going to try finance your upcoming movie "Billy Dead" through an IPO. Isn't that incredibly risky? How do you know it will attract backers?
We don’t. It’s a bit of a long shot but after 180 days, the project reverts to Ethan [Hawke] and I – we are the two producers on it. We could then go out and do it the usual way of going and knocking on doors and going to all the companies and begging for money. But the reality is, “Waking the Dead” took nine years to get made, “Mother Night” took six years to get made, so to take six months or a year to try this experiment is no more risky than any time you try to make any type of challenging material. Inherently the risk is you’ll never get it made. So for me, this actually felt like a great thing to try. If it works, it’s a phenomenal new way to finance these kinds of movies.
If it works, it’s going to catch on.
And if it doesn’t work, we’ve spent a year. Okay, we would have spent a year anyway going to Miramax, going to this place, having meetings, having people get in and then fall out. To me it was no more a long shot than any other way you try to get a movie financed.
I don’t know why anyone hasn’t done it before.
I don’t either. We may find there is a reason. The reason may be that nobody invests the money. Who knows? We may find it doesn’t work. It has actually been done in Australia. It’s not been done here but there is some precedent for it, and it did succeed. I’m kind of fascinated to see it.
When they first brought it to me – this company ‘Civilian’ – it seemed like the wackiest idea in the world. And then the more they explained the research they’d done, the homework they’d done, how it was being set up, I thought, “You know, these guys seem really smart and it seems like they know what they’re doing. It seems like a really worthwhile thing to try.”
I think it could be a lot of fun for people. If it works, thousands of people get to be kind of producers on the movie, and they get to be part of the process and part of the movie getting made. We get to make a film and hopefully the movie does well and somebody makes money on it. But who knows? That’s the one thing you have to be very careful about when you do this because unlike Hollywood where everything is based on hype, one has to be very careful when you deal with stocks. You can’t be inaccurately optimistic or your stockholders can turn around and sue you. I had to learn a whole new way of selling movies in a town that’s based on hype and exaggeration. One has to be scrupulously clear about what one’s saying about this.
You’ll have a built in word of mouth chain if you get 1,000 investors that are so into this film?
That was part of the whole theory that Civilian came up with. It was just very smart, I thought. I really hope it works. I think it would be so nice if it did. And then maybe you could get these movies made a different way.
What projects are you hoping to get made soon?
Certainly "Billy Dead" is way up there. There’s a piece that I have with Michael Caine and Jennifer Connolly and Paul Bettany called “A Thousand Days” that I’d love to make. There’s a piece with Ed Harris called “The Homing” that we might even have the money for. We don’t know. It’s one of those classic Hollywood stories where we’ve got people saying they’re going to finance, but none of the deals are actually done. I’ve got a piece with Ben Kingsley called “When God Dips His Love in My Heart.” These are all pieces that I’ve been developing for periods of years; they’re all actors I’d be desperate to work with. Any one of those would make me very, very happy.
PAGE 2: "A Thousand Days" and Sticking With Independent Films
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Director Keith Gordon Interview - "The Singing Detective"
