Greenlight Yourself Part 2: Misconceptions

Lies You've Been Told

Last time, I wrote about how the ongoing slump in Hollywood has made it nearly impossible for early-career creatives to break into Film & TV by relying solely on scripted material.

An excerpt:

Seasons are shorter, runs are shorter, rooms are smaller and hiring at lower levels is basically non-existent. At the time of this writing, I now know very few established writers who are working, let alone early-career writers.

This is bad news to anyone who intends to build their career through the traditional studio system, but for anyone who’s willing to think creatively about an entertainment career, it represents a huge opportunity.

What a fucking downer. I’m sorry I put all 40 of you through that.

I really do harbor an optimistic outlook on this stuff, even if my writing comes across as more… apocalyptic. Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep last week or something.

But before we get into the how of “how do I greenlight myself?”, we first have to address some of the blockers that people face: The misconceptions that stifle progress and keep you from achieving your creative goals.

These are myths perpetuated both by your internal critic as well as well-meaning albeit misguided friends and mentors who just want what’s best for you.

Whether they know it or not, they’re feeding you lies, and I’d like to clear up some of these myths / half-truths so that they don’t put a stopper on your ambitions.

Note: This post is focused mostly on misconceptions surrounding self-distribution on social/UGC platforms like YouTube and TikTok, but a lot of these also apply to any self-distribution model, including independent producing and self-financing.

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Misconception 1: “I Need Big Budgets for Quality"

You’ve seen breakout success from projects shot on iPhone - even feature-length projects.

You’ve heard - and you believe - all that matters is the story.

You know it doesn’t matter what lenses the project is shot on, it doesn’t matter how big the crew is. Groundbreaking, impactful stories have been made using accessible tools like the phone you’re probably reading this on.

See:

• Unsane (Dir. Steven Soderbergh, budget $1.5M)

• High Flying Bird (Dir. Steven Soderbergh, budget $2M)

• Tangerine (Dir. Sean Baker, budget $100K)

• Ghost of My Father (Dir. Anthony Z. James, budget unknown)

At the same time, you believe you won’t be taken seriously if your project isn’t shot on an Alexa with Panavision anamorphic primes and professionally-mixed sound and a crew of 150 and a really great TREAT TRUCK.

Obviously, better tools and more people help you tell your story in a better way. If you can’t see or hear your lead actor, you can’t tell your story faithfully. But technology is now at the point where any bottlenecks you encounter will NOT be in your gear or the size of your crew.

It’s easy to mistake money for professionalism, but you can have one without the other.

Grab some friends and start making.

Will a low budget thing rival the fit and finish of professional Hollywood productions? No. But, arguably, it doesn’t need to, since the consumer definition of quality is shifting, as discussed by

Doug Shapiro

in his Tectonic Trends in Media:

“New entrants don't only compete on the traditional measures of performance, they introduce new attributes. If those attributes or features take hold with consumers, then they change the consumer definition of quality.”

If people are interested in the story you’re telling, they are increasingly willing to overlook a lack of fidelity / polish that you’ve grown accustomed to watching film and TV.

That’s why people are moving to social platforms where production value takes a back seat to personality.

And if people are NOT interested in the story you’re telling, the hard truth is: There’s no amount of production value that’s going to change that.

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Misconception 2: "I Have to Do Everything Myself"

This one is a doozy, and I don’t fully understand where it comes from. A lot of people I’ve talked to about making stuff themselves harbor a very unfounded fear of having to go it alone.

They worry that they won’t be able to get people to join them on this journey unless they pay industry rates. This is just not true, especially if you live in a major entertainment hub like Los Angeles.

There are literally tens of thousands of aspiring creatives in this town just dying to be asked to go out and make something.

And if you can’t find any, hell, message me directly and I’ll help you find people. And while you’re at it, subscribe if you haven’t already:

Creative people are desperate to create. Always will be. If you’re a creative, you should already know this.

And in a world where traditional, mainstream opportunities are shrinking, more and more creative people are looking for places to put their creativity.

In LA especially, just about everyone wants to be part of something creative.

They want to be part of something exciting, and all you have to do is ask them. You may get rejected, they may have a different creative vision than the one you’re proposing, but that’s okay.

The key is to start small, be transparent about what you can offer, and build a community of like-minded creators who share your passion for making stuff.

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Misconception 3: "Social platforms aren't 'real' entertainment"

You’re wrong. You really couldn’t be more wrong.

Entertainment is only entertainment if there is an audience to entertain. Otherwise, it’s just self-congratulatory navel gazing. And audiences are flocking to social platforms to be entertained.

The numbers are undeniable (pulled from another Doug Shapiro piece The Relentless, Inevitable March of the Creator Economy):

• Social video now represents about 1/4 of all time spent with video in the US

• The creator economy is growing 5x faster than traditional media (25% vs 5% annual growth)

• Creator content has accounted for almost half of all media & entertainment growth over the last four years

• While traditional media struggles to grow at all, the creator economy is projected to more than double by 2030, reaching $600+ billion (25% of the entire media market)

And while a lot of the stuff on social media right now is less “entertainment” and more “ways to pass the time,” people are begging for quality / emotionally evocative stuff to appear on their feeds: Real stories about believable characters who have relatable goals.

I’ve already mentioned some notable breakouts in the last post, and more are emerging every day. I anticipate this trend will continue as these UGC platforms continue to mature.

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Misconception 4: "I need to wait until I can do it 'properly'"

This misconception takes 2 forms:

1. People abiding by a perfectionist mentality needing their pilot or their short or their story to be told the “right way”: With proper gear and a big budget and a crew. We addressed this above.

2. People waiting to jump into social platforms until they’ve done all the research about what to make and how to make it.

There’s no right way to dive into these platforms. I know for a fact that I’m “doing Substack wrong” but I just keep typing because:

1. I truly don’t give a shit about embarrassing myself creatively anymore.

2. At worst, by continuing to write, I am improving my writing.

3. I’m a naturally curious person and I love learning about what works and what doesn’t. If I keep posting stuff on here, I have hard metrics I can examine firsthand to determine what is and isn’t working.

If you know anyone else who’d like seeing me embarrass myself in real time:

Just start doing things.

The faster you learn about what works and what doesn’t, what you like and don’t like making, the faster you can get to making stuff that you like making and that resonates with audiences.

If you wait until the thing is perfect, you’re going to miss the biggest opportunities for traction (I talk about that a bit below).

And if you’re just joining social platforms and producing content for fun / as a hobby, then it doesn’t matter what people think anyway, and - let’s be honest - you’re probably not a subscriber, so I don’t know who I’m even talking to or why this sentence is still going.

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Misconception 5: "I'll lose creative control on social platforms"

There’s some truth to this.

In order to establish yourself as a successful creator on one of these UGC platforms, you have to kowtow to the audience a bit. Lean into the types of stuff that they want to watch.

To most people, that’s less than ideal because it represents compromising your creative vision to a certain extent. This is not unfounded.

However - particularly for people who aren’t high-powered showrunners - you will have to compromise your creative vision no matter the medium you operate in.

In fact, it’s actually worse in film and TV, because of the number of other cooks in the kitchen:

You have to answer to the audience, but then you also have to answer to the studio exec, and the network exec, and oh, would you look at that, social media is clamoring for XYZ character to return from the dead, and all of a sudden you’re being pulled in 4 directions by the studio, the network, your own creative vision, and the viewing public.

Everyone wants their pound of flesh, creatively speaking.

You don’t get to choose the different directions you’re pulled in, but self-distributed platforms typically have fewer creative demands.

At least with social platforms, you have a direct line with your audience, so creative doesn’t get pulled in quite so many different directions.

Look at Bistro Huddy. Drew Talbert is the showrunner of his own production, with full creative control and no middle men.

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Misconception 6: "Building an audience takes too long"

For the impatient among us, this is true.

But building an audience in traditional media - TV and Film - doesn’t happen overnight either. If you include the time it takes to get a project sold and produced - which you should - it can sometimes take years to get people to pay attention to your work.

Whereas, with social / UGC, if you’re willing to just get out there and start making stuff, you can start building an audience right away. You won’t be blocked by funding or getting greenlit by a studio.

Plus, by the time that you’ve started to accumulate a meaningful audience, you’ll have accumulated several other things alongside it:

1. Boatloads of learnings under your belt about what works and what doesn’t, which makes you a better creative.

2. A large body of work to showcase to people who might want to hire you.

3. A big presence on social platforms, which is great for marketing even in traditional media.

One way to think about building an audience is to consider targeting a niche. This is how a ton of creatives gain a foothold in building an audience, I’ll be sure to do a whole separate post on this at a later date, so subscribe below to get that delivered.

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Misconception 7: "Building an audience will be easy"

On the other hand, let’s not be delusional: You can’t expect to start posting content on social media and get an immediate response from people. When this does happen, it’s very rare, and usually short-lived. Do you remember Salt Bae or Damn Daniel?

Normally, it takes time to build an audience base. Ask just about anyone who’s achieved any level of success on these platforms.

This is a kick in the genitals to most people (see gratuitous groin-kick illustration below).

Is this not the content you came for?

Building an audience on any platform - especially social/UGC - requires patience and consistency.

Fortunately, if you’ve been trying to be a professional writer / director / creative for a while, these are two traits you should possess in bulk.

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Misconception 8: “I have to give up TV / Film”

A lot of people present a false choice between the new thing - social / UGC - and the other thing - writing feature and pilot scripts or developing that type of entertainment.

These things aren’t mutually exclusive. Yes, commit some amount of time to making short-form, producible content, but also keep writing your pilot / feature script.

Do this for several reasons:

1. (Ideally) you love doing it. You wanted to create for TV or Film because you’re passionate about the medium. It will make you feel good.

2. At some point in their careers, even inexperienced writers/creatives will get asked by some important Hollywood figure - an Agent, Exec, etc. - what they’re working on. And they’re almost always referring to a TV/Feature project. Be ready with both social content and (at least) one of these things.

3. You’ll become a better writer by focusing on creating both short-form and long-form material. Besides, working in multiple mediums will diversify your content and prevent these muscles from atrophying.

One other point about this: There is a model emerging that combines the most useful aspects of social / UGC platforms - the affordability, the cutting out of the middle man - and uses these to build atop the existing traditional media ecosystem, but without the permission of a gatekeeper.

And who else is leading the charge but Mark Duplass, who I discuss in more detail in Part 1.

The Ankler.

writes a bit about this new model in a post they just dropped:

Indie TV: ‘Holy Shit, This is a Viable Model’

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Misconception 9: “I don’t respect the medium, so I can ignore the medium”

Trivialize social / UGC at your peril.

I mean it. The only difference between a respected medium and a belittled medium is time.

Next time, we’ll talk about why it’s still early days for social platforms and why the future of UGC includes serious scripted content.

Stay tuned,

Jon