Tim Tortora, Hollywood CFO and Movie Producer

AUTO-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

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Welcome back friends to our podcast, unlocking your world of creativity. And when we say your world of creativity, I enjoy traveling around the world, talking to creative experts and practitioners about how they get inspired and how they organize their ideas, but also how they gain the confidence and the connections to launch their work out into the world. And today we're stamping our creative travel passport at lax. And we're talking with Hollywood, CFO and movie producer, Tim Totara Tim. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's very good. Been great to talk to Tim, and we're going to explore a couple of different angles of this business. One is how to organize the filmmaking and actually make money. Tim is a outsource and independent contract CFO for filmmakers, but we're going to talk about another subject too. And that's the young up and coming artists and filmmakers, how they can get into the business. Some of the areas of financing and logistics they need to know to be successful. Tim, it's great that you're going to help us in both areas. Yeah. I'm glad to do

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It. It's something I'm passionate about. And I love this industry. It's it's uh, made my career for 35 years and I want to see people come here and succeed and not go home. Feeling like a failure.

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Yes. Unless there's after more than three decades now, as stem as described working from like Oprah's film and TV and long form a unit to the Bingi franchise and Mandalay sports, entertainment and movies like the movie and more, he knows what it takes to actually make money. So Tim, maybe we start there and say, yeah, you've got the creative idea. You're working with the creative collaborators. How is the interplay that says, I know what my vision is now, how do we make sure we get it financed and stay on budget? Well, there's

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Kind of two buckets. One of them is you get in line and you go play with this big corporate studio network streaming entrenched interests. You take your material. Uh, you submitted, if you can, if you have a lawyer or an agent, um, and you go through the development grind and either gets green later, or it doesn't. And those rates are, once you get something into a studio or a network or an OTT, I'll call them generally buyers. Once you get it into a buyer, the kill rates, you know, 96% of all the material they get, they probably convert 4% of it into material that goes to the next step. And then from that about 40% of it just never gets made. In other words, they'll buy an idea. They'll develop it for a while and it may or may not get into production. And those don't get into production are typically on average, about 40%.

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So that's a traditional method. We hear it all the time. If you're young and you're not connected, you have to get connected. And the way you do that is you show your work. If you're a writer, you get into competitions. If you're a director, you post stuff, wherever you can so that you can get credit and demonstrate that you have the skills. If you're a producer, you have to buy material, you have to option it, own it. If you don't own material, you're just a guy hanging on. And the first thing they do is they clip those people off. They get rid of them.

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Um, and you know, we talked to a lot of creative artists and entrepreneurs, really? And we talk about filmmaking as entrepreneurship. It sounds like, I mean that you're always snitching, right? You, you know,

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I say this to everybody. Crew directors, writers, actors, producers, you are running a business. And the brand is you. Whether you're a grip electric or an actor, you're still doing the business. That is you. You get paid like an employee. That's a, that's a requirement of the IRS and how the government state and fed wants to collect their veg from the producers who are making shows. So everybody gets processed as payroll. However, you don't work at a place. You don't work for a person. You have sponsors in the industry. What I call sponsors, not mentors. And they are the people who give you jobs for the projects they're on. So as an entrepreneur, you have to be constantly connecting and selling to your sponsor so that you can get the next job and you need to build a network. That's like a spider web. And we've got a whole bunch of places where you can go. When the job you just got on is about to finish. You need to go out and go talk to the next group of people who are going to give you a job. And that is tapping into your network, your spider web, and connecting with your sponsors.

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So many people tend to say, you know, I have this great idea. If I could only get it in front of the right person. Right. You know, where, where on that spider web do you start starter? Does it matter? Well, it

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Kind of depends on who you are. So, um, I'm gonna leave crew out because that's just getting connected to people and networkings and saying, I want to be a grip, electric prop wardrobe, whatever transportation, you name it. Right? Um, the, the more difficult part is being a creative and that includes writers, directors, actors, and producers. So the answer to the question, if you're a writer, you need to be communicating with development executives, they buy ideas, they buy screenplays, or you need to be connecting with showrunners people who are buying writers. So a show runner on a TV show is essentially the head writer that came up with the idea. They pitch it to a network and they they're looking for writers to do the heavy lift. They don't want your ideas. They don't want your fresh pilot Bichon, great idea. They want to see a screenplay that they can take 90% of the work you've done and ignore 10% and add their Polish to it.

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Because the hardest the heaviest lift for a writer is actually starting with a blank page and finishing 50 pages for a one hour script or 120 for a two hour, whatever that is. So they want someone who can write character structure actually in reverse order structure, first character second. And then is it close to what I, what my show is and do I just need to spend 10 to punch it up? That's what they're looking for. Um, a director you're pitching to development executives and to some extent, uh, studio people. And that's just, you know, you getting into festivals and getting your stuff shown, whether it's on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or whatever, which by the way, I'm not a fan of those platforms. We're giving them free content. We are basically allowing them to turn themselves into billionaires and they're throwing us a few digital scraps, which I think is, you know, it's BS if you ask me, but that is the system.

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And that's how you get your stuff known. I say, use it for what it is, which is it's a method to get your content out to the world. And if you're a director, you can run some advertising, five bucks a day, run it for a few weeks, run it for a month and you can keep it focused on a particular zip code. That's the kind of granularity we can get into now. So you should spend a little bit of money. Don't rely on viral. That's a gamble, spend a little bit of money trying to get your material in front of the executives who might be watching Facebook. You can also pick job titles and a whole bunch of other ways of connecting with these people. Use it, spend a little bit of dough, not a lot. It may pan out for you. If it doesn't make a new piece of material and just keep honing your craft.

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If you're an actor, you have to connect with casting directors, producers, aren't going to get you jobs. Some to some extent directors can writers will not. So you're looking for directors and casting directors in reverse order, casting directors, first director, second, the producer just wants to hang out with actors. And in some cases they want to pull a Harvey Weinstein. Um, and I always say, be careful of that. Casting happens in a commercial environment with other actors around and you will never be in the room alone. And if you are, there will be a camera there and there will be on the other side of the door, there will be a lot of actors doing auditioning for the same role, and there will be an associate or an assistant. If you're going to somebody's house or their hotel room or a bar, that's not an interview. That is a potential first day. So I say to actors, walk away from those environments. It's not appropriate, right.

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You know, what's professional. That's really perfect. And Jen, you're, you're describing some of these kind of logistics, things that I think is essential to make the connections I wanted to also elevate maybe to the 50,000 foot view of the creative process. I think that sometimes people may see the nuts and bolts and the workings, especially maybe the financing of the films and TV shows as not that creative. It just has to be done, you know, but there's gotta be so much more behind that. That is the creative thinking process there is.

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And, and you know, this is a business. Well, first of all, it's a business. It's a multi multi-billion dollar business. And you have to remember that. It's not just like, it's not just a bunch of dudes and girls going into the woods to make a movie. It is a business and it needs to make money. And if your movies make money, it doesn't tap into an audience. You don't find demand. You're not going to work. It's just that simple. So you have to be selling my dear friend of mine, Harry Beck says she calls it the red shoe, blue shoe parable. If the business is making and buying blue shoes and you're making red shoes, you got to start making blue shoes. Otherwise you're not going to sell any shoes. And I think it's really apt. You have to figure out what the industry is, buying, not what the industry is exhibiting because whatever they're exhibiting, they were buying two or three years ago.

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So you have to read the trades and figure out what's getting bought. What are the ideas? What are the, what are those? What are they? What's what's of interest to those people, right? That's if you want to play in the commerce game, in the professional leagues of making content, right? So, but the creative process just, it begins by getting plugged into the industry. And other filmmakers, you have to find a sponsor. If you're new to this business who can pull you up and get you into a seat where you're working as an assistant, and there are many, there's probably 10 or 12 different assistants within the, within a production or a production company that you want to get on. Once you get into the cycle, you're connected to it. You can network, you can work your way up. Your sponsor can pull you up into the next job as they're moving up through the ranks.

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So the creative process is it happens in a vacuum with creative people, but once that process ends and you actually sell something. Now you're selling to development, you're selling to marketing, you're selling the distribution. You're selling to crew producers all the time. Creatives are always selling and honestly, writers, they're almost like they're almost like troglodytes. They just want to hang out in their cave and throw out content and have someone throw meat in, right? I'm not saying they're short, hairy people. I am saying they want to, they kind of want to behave like a troglodyte, right? They don't really want to hang out with people that want to be in their head. They want to come up with ideas and they can fill a page. They can do it really fast writers. Right. And they're never, there's never a shortage of ideas with those people.

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That's so true. And then I guess we've been talking about selling the work, you know, like an entrepreneur, always pitching. Um, and what about then on the financing side, somebody says, why I need money to help produce my idea? How, how did the film and TV, uh, people get these financing packages that they need? Where's the money come from? It

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Comes from the big puzzle, big pools of money. It comes from the studios, the networks and the streamers. And there's some financeers around the world. There's maybe a half dozen of them. Um, but they have a, usually a distribution apparatus attached to them like canal plus, or one of those kinds of entities. And the system is at the top, uh, populated by financier's and financier's can be both a financier, a distributor, and a producer. Uh, Sony is a version of that. So as universal. So those NBC they're all distributors. And then there's exhibition on the other end, right? That's where you watch it on TV or the streaming platform, or you see it in the movie theater, ultimately underneath the financier is our production companies that have overhead deals. Those producers are the people you have to sell to. If you have an idea, whether you're a, well-known already produced director or writer or a newbie, the producers who have overhead deals that bring material into a financier, a studio in network, or an OTT, those producers are the people who are buying and looking for material.

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And the studio pays them for that job, right? They pay them anywhere from, you know, a couple hundred grand, a year up to four or five or $20 million. In the case of one of my old employers, um, over five years. So they gave us $5 million a year, $4 million a year, simple math, Tim, uh, $4 million a year to find material and pitch it into the network and the studio. That was our job. So as a con, as an idea, generator, you have to get connected to those development staffs. And most of them are young. They're largely women, although not, not always the case, but they're, they're mostly young. Uh, they're, well-read their, their, their area diet. It's about literature. It's about museums hanging out, watching movies, watching shows, breaking them down, understanding story. I mean, these people by and large Ken quote, Homer Shakespeare, I mean, all of that old school classic literature that we all know about these people think in those terms, they travel in those terms, and this is a language they use.

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And they're looking for that thing that gets their attention. So to give you an example, a good development executive will plow through five galleys from a publisher. Those could be anywhere from 200 pages to 800 pages in a week. They'll plow through 20 screenplays in a week. And when I say plethora 20 screenplays, they're going to read the first five pages are all 120 pages. If the first five suck, it goes in the pile reject. So they're going to get through about 20 of those. They're probably going to get through five or 10 or 15 articles that get pitched and that's in one week, multiply that times 50 weeks. That's how much material development executives is plowing through every single year.

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So I love that good insight. Well, let's turn the page to your own creative process. You've written a book about all these experiences years, this great metaphor of a swamp, uh, cause it's thick and it's difficult. You call it. Yeah. Tell us how you began to develop your book.

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The book is actually, uh, a is a story of, of my experience of being ripped off by the Hollywood con man for the first time in over 20 years. So I worked, I started in Hollywood. I had no family or friends. I started out as a tape op in a recording studio while I was in college. I think I was a freshman or a sophomore. I was not even 19 years old. I was I'm born in may. And I got this internship in March. So I just sort of wound my way through the ranks, working and starting as a tape op and working my way up into being a production executive and a producer. And I was on a picture in Mexico. Well, originally it was in North Carolina and the producers came and said, we got to go to Mexico. And I thought, that's weird.

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We're about to shoot in six days. What are we doing? This is a terrible idea. They're like, no, no, no, no, it'll work out. It'd be great. I was like, okay, you're paying me. I guess I'm going to go do it. And it was, it was really my greed that made me go, okay, I'll get on that plane where I should have just said, you know what guys find someone else. This is not for me. Um, but nonetheless, it was, uh, it was more of a payday and I went there and so we, we got the show mounted in 30 days using amazing crew in Mexico. And on the seventh day they came to me and said, ah, we're out of money. And I'm like, wait a minute. You're out of money. We only spent 7 million and you, we ha we have 14. And they're like, yeah, no, we don't have 14.

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We have seven. So this is the story about me in that environment. And then it's told through me, consulting for an internet millionaire saying, you know, you want to spend $18 million on this filmmaker who really, you shouldn't be, it's kind of a waste of your time. And I explained to him how the industry works. And I explained my experience on this movie in Mexico and then wind them through how a deal actually happens. Like when you hear about a hundred million dollars box office, what does that mean? Who gets that money? How does it break down? Well, this particular guy spent in for round numbers, spent $20 million making the movie, gives it to a distributor distributor exhibits. It, they make a hundred million at the box office and he's still $2 million in the hole. How's that possible? You made a hundred million bucks. Well, we go through how that works, how the statement works and you know, we, it gets ground down all the way down. The process. Creatives are always the last

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To get paid. That's such a good insight. Well, Tim, we'll definitely check out the book. Now you're beginning to, as I said, at the beginning, consultant, teach some of these principles and practices to up and coming artists. Uh, what is your format? What's your program? How can they get in touch with it?

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Well, you can, uh, get in touch with the program@timtotara.com. You can catch me on any of the, uh, any of the channels, uh, of the social channels that are connected up in the upper right of the page. And you can also get connected just by at the bottom, say, Hey, I'm interested in this class and I'll send you to a webinar or we'll get on a call and we'll talk about it. But what it basically is, it's a four week course that you take partially online, where you get a bunch of information downloaded into your head. And then we do a Q and a every Thursday. And then in that four week process, you're learning about the industry. Who's in it, how it's structured, we're setting your goal, dream job. We're setting a path for you getting to that job. We're picking a vertical that you want to work in.

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We're going to create a, an elevator of who you are. That's three sentences. It says I am a, so in my case, I am a CFO. I'm currently working, uh, as whatever it is looking for work as whatever I'm looking for, right? You need to be able to say that in three sentences. Cause if you don't set the tone and you don't set the frame of how you fit into this business, the business will set the frame for you. And you have to be careful about that. And it is a business of copycat and it's a business of referral and it's a business of perception, more than anything else. So we get that really settled and very clear. And then you sit and you will do a lot of research about your 20 favorite shows that fit into your vertical. And when you're done with that, you'll have a list of people who you can reach out to.

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You're going to connect with them. And you're going to look for an informational interview. That's ultimately what we're after. So we can sit in front of the front of someone, listen to them, tell us their story. And so that we show up as being relevant, um, understanding the industry and looking for that person to make a referral. So that at the end of the interview, we can say, I am a dot, dot dot, and then I'm looking for work as, and if you hear of anybody looking for that, feel free to throw my name around and your hand on your credit list and you walk away and you do that in 20 minutes. So we do that over the course of about four weeks where you sit and do the research. We have some exercises each week, it's online, it's Q and a, and then there's also about three hours of two and a half hours of work that we'll do together. Me and my students. And I do those in one-on-one it's specifically about, let's get clear about what you want and let's get clear about how you're going to get there. And then here's a, here's a path to get there. And now let's go do the research to figure out how to get connected.

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That sounds very helpful. Well, Tim, I've learned so much from you just in this short interview. So it does make me want to go to your website, look at some of these classes in courses and, and take advantage of your training, especially if, if I'm in that up and coming, uh, actor, filmmaker, uh, category, for sure.

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Yeah. I love working with people who are new to the business. It's I didn't have the benefit of someone explaining to me how it worked. And I honestly, I got lucky. I really did. I got lucky because I was sitting in a recording studio at school. I was taking a recording class. I was a music student at the time and this woman walks through, she was a, she was a couple of years older than me. And she was an intern at the same studio and said, I work for this guy, Dan van Patten. I'm an intern there. And Dan was the founding member of the band, Berlin, a drummer. And he produced a bunch of stuff in the eighties, a bunch of new wave music. And she said, I worked for Dan and he's looking for another intern. Do you want the job? And I was like, what?

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Yeah, why not? And the only reason I got that job was because I was competent at this thing, which was really technical working in a recording studio. And I loved it. I just ate it up and I really thrived in it. And she happened to recognize that and her name was Martha and I owe her a debt of gratitude to this day. She, she really me, my start in the business. And if I didn't have that person who knows how I would have been able to get in, I probably would have, because I really wanted it. There was nothing more I wanted to do than work in the movie business. And, but that was my entrance. And I parlayed it from that into whatever job I'm doing a dumb doing now as the CFO.

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Yeah, exactly. Well listeners, I think this has been good insight. My guest has been Tim Tortura and his website is Tim tortola.com. He's got lots of great resources. His book is a Hollywood accounting. And I think as a summary, you've really given us the insight that we're always pitching and we always have to have our brand in mind. What is it that we do? How can we do it and what do we have to offer? So I really appreciate you coming on the show, Tim. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. I really like it. I really enjoyed it. That's a lot of fun and listeners come back again. We're going to continue around the world travels with creative experts like Tim, and we're going to learn what inspires them, how they organize their ideas and how they make the connections and gain the confidence to launch your work out into the world. So until next time, I'm mark StInson and we're unlocking your world of creativity.