E22 Following a Creative Passion
After selling a software company and working in consulting, Patrick Riley took a risk and produced the film Tuscaloosa. He shares his experience during the making of the film, how he collaborated with the cast and crew, and shares hilarious stories about making the best of situations that are going all wrong. Patrick comments on the complexity of creating an accurate depiction of 1970s Alabama for a 2020 audience. Patrick offers advice for creatives and provides examples for how to nurture creativity while working in a professional career. Finally, Patrick discusses the innovations developing in the film industry and their impact on the way we consume, create, and find films.
Patrick Riley is a veteran technology entrepreneur, producer, and musician. As a technology entrepreneur, Patrick co-founded and was CEO of Modern Survey. Over the course of his career, Patrick has directed and produced dozens of music videos, documentaries, and short films.
Patrick Riley:
I had this moment on that day, it was probably about 2:00 PM or 3:00 PM, and again, we were going to start shooting at 6:00 PM that night. We didn't have the motorcycle. We still didn't have the right car. I remember I was sitting in my backyard, literally with a cell phone in hand. I'd been on the phone all day, and I put the phone down. I talked to my wife, Jennifer. I said, “I've failed. It's just not going to work. I have like 60 people who are going to show up to a parking lot tonight. I have stunt guys in from LA, and I don't have cars for them to drive.”
Don MacPherson:
Many of us envision following a creative passion, but don't want to assume the financial and career risks that come with it. Today's guest deferred his dream of making a film for nearly two decades. After starting, growing, and selling a software company called Modern Survey, Patrick Riley was presented an opportunity to be involved in a feature-length independent film. He jumped at the chance. Patrick is going to share his experience in the film industry, what he learned through the process, and advice for other creatives wanting to try something new. This is an especially exciting interview for me to conduct. In addition to Patrick being a close friend, he and I have worked together for 25 years with offices next to each other for much of that time. I had a front-row seat watching the ups and downs of the making of the film now known as Tuscaloosa.
Patrick, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Patrick:
Hey, great to be here, Don.
Don:
Let’s start out by having you describe your background and what you were doing before you got involved in the film industry.
Patrick:
My career intentions originally were to work in the film business, and I was kind of a classic creative, interested in film writing, film directing. Just loved the idea of great stories. And spent the kind of my early 20s trying to break into the business. So, it was working on independent features here in Minneapolis, working on music videos. I got to work on a Prince movie, which was really cool. Then I ended up in Los Angeles for a while. I was working at Walt Disney Studios doing script development. I was an assistant to some executives there. Did some public television. So, really, an assortment of things in the business. But then I became a jaded writer when I was about 24, 25 after first couple of scripts that I had written, almost became movies, but didn't.
Then I decided to focus my creative interests on punk rock. My interest in punk rock or really music was that it was a form that I could work through to the end. That's really what drew my interest to it. Because what I was learning quickly through filmmaking or through screenwriting is you spend all this time creating like a blueprint for something that could be made, but if it's never made, you get really frustrated. And as a young creative, that was something that was just wasn't enough for me. And music was something where you could see that musical form or that creative form all the way through to its end. But to pay the bills through all of this, I sort of randomly ended up working in tech. Which is sort of the beginning of my journey into being an entrepreneur. And then I learned pretty quickly that being an entrepreneur and creating a company was really akin to being an artist.
This idea of getting an idea, and teams and people moving forward with something new, something original. And that energy of creating a startup or a company versus playing in a band or creating a film project are all really similar.
Don:
How did this opportunity to make a film present itself to you?
Patrick:
The first time I had a chance to read the script for the film, my longtime friend, Philip Harder, he's a filmmaker director, and he's a pretty famous music video director, commercial director. So, he had this script and I had a look at it and thought the story was good, and was very good initially. Then, after the Trump election, I really wanted to respond to it, and not even just from a political perspective, but just from just a way to have a dialogue around what was going on in the world, the kind of polarization of ideas. This script I felt like was just a bullseye for that. As an artist, as a creator, I said to Phil, I was like, “It’s time to make this movie. This is a movie to be made now.” And that energy that the two of us had ended up moving pretty quickly through other folks that got involved. We were able to get just a little financing together, a great casting director, and all of a sudden we got some great stars attached and everything went pretty quickly.
Don:
Talk a little bit about what the film is about and what some of the themes or some of the topic areas are that really resonated with you.
Patrick:
Tuscaloosa is a movie set in 1972 Alabama. And as you can imagine, that was a very dynamic time for youth and for our country. A lot of change is going on: the Vietnam War is kind of hitting the peak of its unpopularity; civil rights movement has been continuing to boil over. The story kind of lands us in that world. And what's so interesting about it is the frame that it brings to that world is through this idea of white privilege. The main character, Billy Mitchell, he's an upper middle-class kid. His father is a psychiatrist who owns this kind of old-world mental institution. And when Billy comes out of college in 1972, he lands a job working on his dad's mental institution to basically mow the lawn and take care of the grounds.
And Billy's smoking a lot of pot and he's just sort of not knowing what he wants to do with this life. That's where the movie starts, is in this world of easygoing, privileged Billy gets to do what he wants to do and sort of has that safety structure that's there. Then that whole notion just starts to get torn apart as the movie moves forward from there. He falls in love with a young woman who is a patient at the mental institution, and she starts to convince him that she's not crazy. And as we learn why she's not crazy, as an audience, we start to understand. And his best friend is a character named Nigel. Nigel's African-American. And Nigel and Billy have been friends since they were kids.
And Nigel's getting involved with a lot of the black power politics at the time. And Billy's trying to understand kind of why, and then starts to see how what Nigel is rebelling against is actually being generated or from his father's world. The world starts to collide and Billy's sense of purpose starts to take form and he needs to take action. That's the movie in a nutshell.
Don:
You also have a number of well-known actors in the film. Can you talk about who they are and what roles they play?
Patrick:
We were really lucky to get a fantastic casting agent involved in the project. Her name is Bess Pfeiffer, and she's out of New York. And Bess had just… I think she was the casting assistant or associate on Stranger Things for the pilot. And so, Bess had this great window into up-and-coming young actors. So, from Stranger Things, we have Natalia Dyer, who plays Nancy Wheeler on the series, Stranger Things. So, she plays Virginia, who's the young woman. She's one of the stars in the movie. Devon Bostick plays Billy Mitchell. Devon is another well known, I think Devon's about 26, 27 now, but another well-known kind of indie movie kid. He was one of the stars in Diary of a Wimpy Kid. He was in the show, The 100, and he's been in a fair amount of television, other indie movies as well. So, he's terrific.
We also have Tate Donovan. He played in Argo, Manchester by The Sea. He was in the television show, The O.C. And maybe perhaps most famously, he was Jennifer Aniston's boyfriend in Friends, or her fiancé for a couple of seasons.
Don:
You started your career in film, you transitioned to software, you worked in software for about two decades. You were a software executive, which is obviously a creative field, but how did that creativity from working in software carry over to working on the film?
Patrick:
My leadership style and management style is about getting the best teams together you can in terms of talent and then enabling them and giving them as much autonomy as you can as well, and give them a clear set of boundaries and a vision. I mean, that sounds really simple, but it's really kind of true. I was really lucky throughout our tenure in running Modern Survey, Don, in that I got to, as you know, take a couple sabbaticals to go and do filmmaking. So, I worked as an assistant director for the Sundance Filmmaker Labs in I think 2003, 2004, and 2007. I got to work with six different directors who were workshopping their movies. And those sabbaticals were really powerful for me for a couple reasons. One is they were like a master's class in filmmaking, and I was getting all this information that was going to end up helping me down the road when I made this film in terms of really understanding how to enable directors to do their best work.
But the other part was learning and watching and how the labs were run and how filmmaking sets were run, in that it was, I would learn from that so much and then take that knowledge back to Modern Survey. I always thought of it as sort of cross-pollinating. The things that always interested me about filmmaking is it's so much more of an endurance sport. I mean, literally, the way you work is so intense, physically intense. I loved the way that felt and that sense of accomplishment, and would try to take those dynamics and bring it back to how we ran Modern Survey as well. And vice versa, there's things I would learn eventually as an executive at Modern Survey that I would bring back to filmmaking. For me, in the end, the concepts are really simple, are very similar. It's about teams, it's about ideas, it's about passion, it's about clear vision, and it's about articulating boundaries and a way of working.
Don:
What is your title on the film and what are your day-to-day responsibilities?
Patrick:
So, I am the producer. Initially when the film started, I came in as the executive producer, basically to help facilitate the process, to help bring together the financing, to help work more as an executive on the project.
Don:
What's the difference between a producer and an executive producer?
Patrick:
The answer to that question is something I learned pretty quickly. I know when-
Don:
Okay. So, I'm not ignorant by not knowing.
Patrick:
Yeah. I know when folks watch TV shows or they watch movies, they're like, “What's the deal with all these executive producers? Who are these people?” Executive producers are really anyone who delivers to this strategic outcome of the movie. It could be someone who's responsible for getting the story developed. It could be someone who's responsible to help with financing. It could be a studio executive who's very hands-on involved with helping to get things going. It really is almost like the board of advisors for the movie, and each one is sort of bringing a different piece to the project. The producer is really more like a line management job. It's the person who really runs the day to day. You're running the profit and loss of the movie. You're making the day-to-day decisions. You're working right alongside the director and helping make decisions. In the film business, it's really an equal parts business role and also a creative role. And you're sort of a sounding board for the director to help figure out, what is he trying to do, he or she trying to do? What are their thoughts and ideas? And how do you kind of problem solve for that and put it into the capabilities of what can be done for the project?
Don:
So, you came in as the executive producer initially, and then how did your role evolve?
Patrick:
We have another producing partner, his name is Brian Etting. He's another executive producer in Los Angeles. And he was sort of my mentor through the whole project. And initially, Brian was going to be sort of the producer, but then Brian had just had a kid, and he was based out of LA, and he had a bunch of other projects working. Really quickly, I realized that the producer chair was not filled, and I kept thinking, well, we'll just kind of cheat around it. But then I realized, no, there's got to be someone in there making all these decisions and making this movie the right way. I just, by default, ended up in that chair, so to speak, and because it just needed to be filled. I really didn't know what I was getting into. I'll tell you, it's a hard job. An incredibly fun job, rewarding job, but it's as hard as being the CEO of a software company. It's a very similar kind of role.
Don:
There's something about the filming of Tuscaloosa that I think we need to get into, which is just the incredible timeframes. You had Tate Donovan for four days, you had Natalia and Billy for two weeks, but you were shooting a period piece in Minnesota in October. This needed to get done in a very short window. Can you talk about that?
Patrick:
As we were nearing the first day of shooting, we were still considering shooting this movie in Georgia, especially since it was getting later in the season here in the Twin Cities. And there was still some skepticism about, can we really pull off the south in the Twin Cities? What we were able to figure out pretty quickly is that one, yes, we could do it here in terms of places we could shoot and locations that would work, but the biggest piece we were trying to solve for was the institution itself. We got a lead that Carleton College, down in Northfield, could be a good location. One of their main buildings on the campus there is called Laird Hall, it's where the dean sits. And it's this beautiful kind of classic southern architecture looking building. Imagine red brick and white pillars.
We went down and took a look at that. I was like, “Oh, this is perfect.” And then the college was really happy to be involved with the project. So, a lot of the locations we were able to pull together down in Northfield, that really allowed us to create this kind of world of the institution, which is probably where maybe 50%, 60% of the film takes place. Additionally, downtown Northfield has this sort of lost in time feel to it. And so, we were able to be able to have that be a proxy for Alabama. Those pieces came together. Then it was literally a leap of faith. We started principal photography, I believe on October 5th. And if you know Minnesota weather, we were basically trying to approximate what was initially supposed to be the sizzling summer heat of Alabama. And then we decided it was going to be sort of the fall of Alabama.
We just rewrote the story a little bit and then we went off and running. We shot between roughly October 5th through, I think, October 17th or 18th or something. We pretty much had beautiful weather. And by the end, we had the great beautiful fall colors here. That course of the two to three weeks that we shot the movie, it was supposed to be about three months of time in Alabama. We were able to shoot right on the cusp of like the last little bit that maybe feels like summer and right into fall, and stretch it out so it feels like three months. But literally, Don, when we finished our last day of shooting, the next day it snowed.
Don:
What was the biggest surprise working on the film that you didn't anticipate?
Patrick:
I always knew filmmaking was hard. I didn't know how hard. I think what's different from software, and we'll call it kind of white-collar business, is just that physical intensity. And you're problem solving for things that are, it's just this one-day problem solve that takes every ounce of energy you have and every bit of adrenaline you have, and then it's gone. You're done. I'll give you an example, Don. We had to do a night shoot, two-night shoots. This was actually some pickup shooting we did for stunts. And we needed basically a couple of motorcycles and a couple of vintage cars to shoot some stunts that were going to be cut into the movie. I'd never produced a stunt scene before. And as I also learned, stunts are rarely shot here in Minneapolis. They just aren't because this is not a big filmmaking town.
And even when they do commercials and things here, there's just not a lot of stunts. So, we had to find a stunt coordinator in LA, and then a couple of stunt drivers to come with him to come out and shoot these scenes. As we were getting closer to shooting, the day of shooting basically, we were going to shoot that night, we still didn't have the vintage car we needed, which was going to be like our hero car, the cop car. And we didn't have a motorcycle that worked. These are the two things. What was happening is these guys who own these vintage cars in town who were supposed to let us use it from the movie, they found out that the stunt drivers we had coming in were stunt drivers from like Fast and the Furious.
And they really were. They're like, “No way someone's going to touch my…” These are like these 70-year-old guys here in Minneapolis. “No way one of these guys is going to touch one of my baby and use it as a stunt driving car.” So, we were literally, that afternoon, having to rewrite the script, trying to find a motorcycle. We had two hours before we were shooting and we still didn't have a motorcycle. And I had like one of the best African-American motorcycle stunt drivers in the country waiting for his motorcycle. Literally, we're calling friends of friends of friends. And finally, at the last minute, we found a motorcycle. It was the wrong color, but it was still gonna work. But Don, I had this moment on that day, it was probably about 2:00 PM or 3:00 PM, and again, we were going to start shooting at 6:00 PM that night.
We didn't have the motorcycle, we still didn't have the right car, and I remember sitting in my backyard literally with a cell phone in hand. I'd been on the phone all day and I put the phone down. I talked to my wife Jennifer, I said, “I've failed. It's just not going to work. I have like 60 people who are going to show up to a parking lot tonight. I have stunt guys in from LA, and I don't have cars for them to drive.” And I was just exhausted and the adrenaline was gone. There's just got to be one more person we can talk to. And Phil, God bless him, our director, he's the endless problem solver. And he finally found, it was like literally a friend's… One of his good friend’s brother-in-law had… He found this Honda CB-300 or something at the last second, and we got it, and it was just, oh. Just thinking of it, now I go back to that feeling, it was just that intensity of adrenaline in problem solving.
Don:
Today's guest is Patrick Riley. We just discussed his transition from software executive to film producer. When we come back from the break, we will discuss the ways in which Patrick collaborated with the film's director and other members of the cast and crew.
Hi everybody, this is 12 Geniuses Podcast host, Don MacPherson. IBM CEO, Ginni Rometty, has said that artificial intelligence is going to change 100% of jobs, 100% of industries, and 100% of professions. AI is just one example of disruptive technology. Other technologies in market or in development will continue to change every aspect of life. At 12 Geniuses, we write, report, and speak about trends shaping the way we live and work. If these trends are important to you, we invite you to follow us on social media. And to book me as a speaker for your next event, contact us at future@twelvegeniuses.com.
We are back with serial entrepreneur and filmmaker, Patrick Riley. We just discussed his role as producer of the film, Tuscaloosa. In this segment, Patrick will share how he and the other members of the film collaborated throughout the creative process. Patrick will also give his advice for people who want to take creative risks.
As you look back at the making of Tuscaloosa, do you see a well-defined creative process that was used?
Patrick:
I think it's a little yes and no. Yes, in that both Phil, the director, and myself were both experienced creatives. Like I had mentioned earlier, Phil has made, I mean, some just incredible music videos through the years, and he's a just a very experienced creative and problem solver. The dilemma for Phil and for me is that we had never made a feature film. And it's really very, very different than making a 30 second commercial spot or a three-minute music video. But again, I think both Phil and I were not as prepared as we would've imagined creatively to… Creating a feature film was like running a marathon. And just the intensity, the amount of decision-making, the number of swim lanes you need to manage is just immense and overwhelming. I think we really didn't know entirely what we were getting into.
Don:
How did you navigate through this, being very new to it, and obviously Phil was new to it?
Patrick:
On the classic producing front, I had some mentors that helped me figure out just the contracting and structural stuff you need to do as a producer, all the Ps and Qs and dotting Is and crossing Ts, and how to negotiate with the guilds, like Screen Actors Guild, and all of those things that are really complex. That all happened literally over a couple of weeks, kind of a crash course. But on the creative side, there were sort of two parts to it. One is the script was great, so that's what we always had going for us. I loved the script. Phil obviously loved the script. Then you really start getting into the idea of story and how are we making sure that this is engaging for an hour and 40 minutes?
And I think the things, again, that Phil and I didn't have a good command of was, how does score work? How does sound design work? How does special effects work? How much should we be spending to make things look period, perfect, versus not? It was really, it became six months of building the next set of team to help us make those decisions around post-production and to help lead us to the right composer, to help lead us to the right editor, sound design, and music supervision. How do you figure out? How do you negotiate to get the songs in? And what does it really cost to do that? It felt a lot like our early days at Modern Survey, Don, where you didn't know what you didn't know, and then you start to learn what you need to know, and then you need to help people help you figure out, who are the right people and who's the highest quality person we can get?
Don:
Phil Harder, the director, spent about six weeks doing the first cut of the film. After that point, how did the two of you collaborate?
Patrick:
Once we got that first assembly and we both kind of understood how much work was in front of us, it really became a full-time job. So, what that meant is it was starting to work on scenes together, and we talk about it, and we have a meeting. Phil would go home, and he's an incredible worker; he would cut something. I’d get like a proof back of a cut within two hours, “What do you think about this? What do you think about that? What do you think about this?” It was a very iterative process where we did a lot of experimentation. And the other thing we did is we did, and I learned this through software, and this is a well-known technique in filmmaking as well, you get test audiences in front of the movie as often as you can.
So, you throw together a cut of the film, you get some feedback, you try to figure out what's working or not working, and then you take those notes, and then you basically iterate again. You take another two, three, four weeks, you put together another cut, and you put it up in front of another batch of people to see what they think about it. And you just try to keep trying to find an objective opinion. At that point, to me, it felt a lot like creating software, and it became a very iterative set of work. Literally, we would be doing cuts to the film, and if we needed to do some additional dialogue, recording, or we were experimenting with voiceover, I would be doing that, or Phil would be doing that. We were like, “Oh, let's try it.” And we had the MacBook Pro and we’d just run some ideas and quickly put it together. And is that working? No, that's not working. Okay. It was very, very hands on at that level of the craft of filmmaking through the post-production process.
Don:
When you were working with Phil, how did you two resolve differences, creative differences or otherwise?
Patrick:
We were lucky that we're very complimentary, and I think, as in any creative relationship, that's important. Phil is a very, I always describe him as a very organic creative, which means that he will continue to wait for discoveries and look for the magic moment for as long as it takes. And that actually can be really frustrating sometimes for a producer, because you're like, “Come on man, we got to get this figured out. We got to move on.” But then experiment number 15 ends up being he was right. You're right.
Don:
Magical.
Patrick:
Yeah, you solved it, you found it, you figured it out. The job as producer is to, as I learned pretty quickly, is to set boundaries and to give rules of engagement. And Phil actually responds to that really well. I think he actually does better under pressure. But you need to give him enough room. So, it's finding that sweet spot, is to give him just enough room to experiment, to figure out how to get something to work, but not too much where he would spin forever.
Don:
Can you give an example of that? What sort of boundary would you set? If we don't have this shot by six o'clock, we're moving on?
Patrick:
When we were shooting, down to the last couple of days, we had, I mean like any movie, we had all the classic problems where we were running out of days. There's a hard end, meaning when these actors are gone, they're gone. There was no extra day to add on. There were scenes and shots that kept getting pushed to the end. Like, we would miss them on a couple of days. And we had the final punch list of stuff, oh my God, we got to get stuff done. There was one scene, it's actually in the script, it's set at a Shoney's, which is a diner restaurant that used to be around in the ‘50s, ‘60s, probably ‘60s and ‘70s. And we shot it at this location called Little Oscars, which is halfway between Minneapolis and Rochester.
We were so short on time, we had a… There was a big scene that was planned as an interior in there, and then there was an exterior, and it was like one of the last days we were shooting. I told Phil, I said, I sat him down actually the day before, I said, “You can't have your interior at Shoney's. It's just not critical to the script.” I said, “I know you want it, but it's just we got to let something go.” I kind of did the thing, “You've got to choose. There's two or three things that got to go. You can't have all of them.” And he agreed to it, and I was like, “All right.” Kind of solved that, and then the production manager was like, “All right, thank you. We got to figure it out.” I was not on set when we were shooting a scene at Shoney's. I was over at another location and then I got a call from our line producer freaking out, He said, “Phil's inside. They're shooting inside.”
I was like, “What?” I was like, “You got to shut him down. You got to shut him down.” But that interior ended up making it into the movie. It's a great moment. It's two shots, but again, it's the push and pull. We did find a way, I mean, in the end. They literally snuck that interior in and probably at about 30 minutes’ worth of time. But if we had planned it, it would've been three hours, and we didn't have three hours.
Don:
During the casting crew viewing, which happened earlier this year, you did a Q&A after the film showed, and somebody pointed out during the Q&A that some of the language in the film was sanitized. This is a film about race and privilege in the early ‘70s, and at that point, the language that was used was more suitable for 2019. Could you describe that situation and how it was resolved?
Patrick:
Yeah, and just to be explicit, we're talking about the N-word. So, go back in time a little bit, right? In 1972, it was frequent that white people would describe African Americans using the N-word. And I heard it myself when I used to visit the South Atlanta in the early ‘70s. I would hear that. I was there as a younger kid. So, I knew this was real.
Don:
It’s historically accurate.
Patrick:
It’s historically accurate. Then you fast forward to 2019, and we're white filmmakers making film, as I said earlier, very much about white privilege, but we're still really dropping into racism and those dynamics. And we have some complex African-American characters. The question is, do we have the license to use that kind of a word as filmmakers? When we shot the film, we followed the novel, again, which was written in 1993. And so, the N-word is in the movie quite a bit, both from African-Americans and also the white characters using it. But as we got further into the cut, we decided increasingly that, we were like, man, this is… If you think of Green Book and these other films that came out, we just realized our license as white filmmakers, the box was getting smaller and we just had to kind of respect that.
We made a decision to, you're right, to sanitize it, to take more and more of it out. And then we did the screening, and then we had some African-American folks that saw the screening who accused us of sanitizing the material. And they were right. So, we were kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place to a certain degree. So, what we decided to do, we really, really thought long and hard about where, we've kind of felt like we had two or three instances we could do it, and where was it most critical to the story? Where was it not gratuitous? And where did it really resonate? And then we finally made those decisions. We did end up adding it back in. I think there's maybe two or three instances where one of the white characters uses it.
Yeah, it dropped us into that philosophical debate about license as white filmmakers in 2019. It's very different world than it was even two years ago or three years ago.
Don:
In what stage is the film now?
Patrick:
So, the great news is, is we're done. We just had our premiere at the Nashville Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. It went great. We hope to have some great news coming out soon about distribution. And we're optimistic the film will be available broadly nationally early next year in 2020. Hopefully, we'll call it March, if all goes according to plan.
Don:
What was the experience of Nashville like and going to that film festival?
Patrick:
The first time you see your movie up on the big screen, there's that incredible feeling of, it was all worth it. Because it's cinema, and just the dynamics of seeing it in the big screen is just so different than seeing it on a small screen. And you spend all this time doing your sound mix to make it work for an auditorium, and you finally get to hear that, and you get swept into this world. The power of the cinema is really something. When I was in the house watching it in Nashville, if someone was to get up and leave, I would be like, “Oh, they hate it.” You're like watching every single person, you're watching their body language. And then the person would come back, I was like, “Oh, they just went to the bathroom.”
Don:
You can't be watching the film, right?
Patrick:
No.
Don:
Like you're an audience member of the audience.
Patrick:
Yeah. And you are wondering how certain things, jokes, you're curious to see how they fly and all of that. And we were also premiering in Nashville, which is in the South, right? And we were really curious how this was going to play with the southern audience. The feedback was just outstanding. I mean, literally the, I'd say one of the main reactions we got, it's just this movie has to be seen.
Don:
The theme of Season 2 of 12 Geniuses is creativity and innovation. We focus mainly on creativity during this conversation, but the film industry is going through a period of innovation. Can you talk about some of those innovations, especially around the different models for releasing a film now?
Patrick:
There's more great content being made than never before. There's more buyers than ever before, but the economics of it have been whittled down to smaller and smaller units, right? If you put on your business cap, you think of the total addressable market, and just think about how we all used to go see movies five or 10 years ago, you'd go and pay 10 bucks to go see a indie movie at the local art house, or we'd just go see more movies in general. But less and less people go to theaters. So, what we've ended up with is that there's still like the tentpole movies, the Marvel movies, the big movies that everyone goes to see, but the rest of the content is kind of moved to really on demand. It's really moved to streaming services, and people wanna watch these kinds of films at home.
What the economics of that has meant is that, we all know about Netflix, and Showtime, and HBO, and their whole business model is about subscription and streaming, and then they're converting that revenue into now production, right? They're making their own content. For us, making an indie movie, when you get it done, your choices are you either kind of sell it wholesale straight to Netflix, which they don't actually buy a lot of original material. Usually they only develop their own things. Or you go with a broader distribution company, which there are more and more of, who basically take your movie on and they focus it like a distributor, but it's really about on-demand, and it makes its way through all the different video on-demand and streaming services. The outcome of that is that the amount of revenue that an independent film can expect to get is a lot smaller now than it was a few years ago.
Don:
There are so many people who are listening to this interview right now, they have creative ideas. What advice do you have for somebody who wants to take a creative risk but might be fearful of taking this leap?
Patrick:
To do anything of quality takes an enormous amount of time and energy. If you're looking to follow a creative project or pursuit, it's going to be probably take more time and energy than you can ever imagine. But I think that's sort of a maxim for life, right? The other piece of the equation which helped me is, this has been, in many ways, filmmaking was sort of like my first love, right? That's what I decided to get my degree in. So, I had a lot of knowledge. Then I've always kept one foot in it through my entire career. And Don, you know this well, when I would run off to Sundance or be involved with different kinds of projects. I was able to, at least from a pure filmmaking perspective, really learn the craft well and really just get to learn through watching others make their movies.
It was just incredibly valuable, so that when it was time for me to produce a film, I had a lot of knowledge. But I also didn't have a lot of knowledge. The other piece which came together for me really quickly was mentoring. And having been a mentor for plenty of other up-and-coming business founders, startup founders, or young software developers, doing a lot of that. Then it was kind of funny to be basically 50 years old, and it's like, “I need a mentor.” Then to see the power of that, oh man, it's just incredible, to be able to have someone that, or a couple people that you can call and get an answer to a question, or help you frame up a question so you can make a good decision in a couple hours.
Don:
A couple of things that you mentioned that I think are really important to discuss is, number one, you made a film. This is a huge, huge creative endeavor. Not everybody's creative endeavor's going to be a film, but what I witnessed, and we've known each other for 25 years now, what I've witnessed is that, that time and energy that you put into the film, that creativity really fueled that. You being creative and watching you make this film, I saw those 16-hour days. You had energy. So, being creative and tapping into that, that provided the energy. And the other thing is you just dove into it. I think that's what people really need to understand is, if you want to paint, paint. If you want to make music, make music. It doesn't have to be an incredible investment financially, or even timewise. Just get started.
Patrick:
I mean, that goes without saying. 100%, Don. You're right. If you want to develop a craft or a skill, you just have to do it, and do it, do it, do it.
Don:
Where can people learn more about you and about Tuscaloosa?
Patrick:
You can learn more about Tuscaloosa at tuscaloosamovie.com, and you can also follow us on Instagram and Twitter and on Facebook. Best way to find me is on Twitter, and it is @PatricktRiley, R-I-L-E-Y.
Don:
Thanks for being a guest, and thank you for being a genius.
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. Thanks also to the amazing team that makes this show possible: Devon McGrath is our production assistant; Brian Bierbaum is our research and historical consultant; Toby, Tony, Jay, and the rest of the team at GL Productions in London make sure the sound and editing are top-notch. To learn how 12 Geniuses can prepare leaders for a rapidly changing business world influenced by shifting demographics, new technologies, and innovative business models, please go to 12geniuses.com.