The Normalization of our Destruction
The shuttering of the CPB; docs in peril; and looking for new/old indie film models
For the last few months, I have not written on my Substack as I’ve had to focus on paying work—which should be a familiar refrain for all of us—but my recent reporting for Documentary Magazine (“Minding the Gaps: How CPB’s Closure Fragments the U.S. Doc Ecosystem”) and an upcoming article for Filmmaker Magazine have crystallized some things that I felt like I should expand upon here.
As we all know, these are challenging times for independent U.S. filmmakers and artists, with the one-two punch of corporate consolidation/cowardice and extreme-right-wing power conspiring together to limit complex thought, dissenting views, and artistic output. The destructive pressures are everywhere, of course, damaging science, education, healthcare, democracy, equality, the environment—you name it—but I’m not a policy expert in those areas, so I’ll just focus on the movies!
The documentary crisis is unprecedented. While I was told recently there may be still around $50 million a year pumping into funding indie docs (from companies, wealthy donors, and philanthropy), the impending closure of the 58-year-old Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) removes some $365 million annually from the indie doc ecosystem. For background, I wrote a story in IndieWire back in December about how this could happen, but it’s far worse than we all expected.
You can read more about the specific and wide array of impacts already felt by the end of the CPB in this recent Documentary Magazine article, from 13 independent documentaries left adrift by ITVS to the end of AfroPop to uncertainty around what crucial doc homes Independent Lens and POV look like in the future. But one specific outrage that should alarm the entire film industry is that someone like Stanley Nelson, one of the most awarded and acclaimed filmmakers, Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning for docs such as Attica, Freedom Riders, Jonestown, and Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution, told me that he had no idea how he was going to fund his films in the future. “We have to look for a new funding model,” he said, “and I don’t know what that would be.”
Let me say something for a second here about documentaries generally: They help fuel our cultural discourse, and arguably, impact the kinds of stories and storytelling that appears across all of our screens. I don’t think we can fully separate out the attack on documentaries from the attack on all independent and socially conscious media, so this should worry all of us—even those working to make sophisticated work for Hollywood.
As Nelson told me, “You have to ask yourself, why is it being done? If it’s not saving .0001% of the budget, what is the purpose?” Nelson said. “I think the purpose is to dumb down the population and take away anything that this administration disagrees with.” Extrapolating from that, Nelson noted that many of the historical documentaries he has made in the past, whether about Emmet Till or the Black Panthers, would not be able to find funding in the current moment.
Let’s remember: This is also happening across the fiction landscape. I don’t think it’s a stretch to ask whether films such as Chinonye Chukwu’s Till (2023) or Shaka King’s Judas and Black Messiah (2021) would be made and distributed today? As producer Avril Speaks told me for another article back in March, when pitching projects about the Black experience to executives, she saw “not even feigned interest,” she said. “You can almost see the fears in their eyes.”
In a conversation I had with Firelight Media’s Loira Limbal, she raised another disconcerting point about how destroying public media effects the way culture and information circulates across the country. If many rural public television stations are unable to survive the post-CPB world, as has been widely reported, what will happen to these independent TV stations?
“They know the power of the work, which is why they are dismantling everything.”
Some might be closing and consolidating, but “will they go up for auction?” Limbal wondered. “And who will be able to buy those stations? Could it be the extreme right for right-wing propaganda. They know the power of the work, which is why they are dismantling everything,” she continued. “This is the playbook of every authoritarian regime. I think there’s a scenario where we don’t have access to the local broadcasting channels, because they’re going to be weaponized.”
In the absence of public or corporation distribution platforms, a lot of the solutions-oriented thinking around the releasing of independent films and documentaries is turning to, of course, streaming platforms.
I’ve heard it before and I heard it more recently: Maybe there can be some kind of streaming channel that becomes a thriving new home for independent documentaries and/or independent fiction films in the absence of the avenues that filmmakers used to depend on. There is current talk of a“Public Access Documentary Channel” that might live on YouTube that could somehow fill distribution and revenue-generating gaps.
But while there may be a small handful of creators successfully finding ways to get their films out into the world via direct-to-audience engagement with the help of online tools, there are also many issues related to discoverability, marketing, standing out from the glut, and actual revenue generation that are still far from resolved. And as I’ve discussed before, such a platform for doc or fiction work would need an enormous amount of capital to fairly license and adequately market its titles successfully.
Because independent filmmakers are the future of the film industry (ahem, Ryan Coogler, Celine Song, Nia DiCosta), it might be incumbent upon major companies to step into this void and try to help, but it seems like they’re also struggling for their survival and figuring how to deal with TikTok, videogames, and Trump’s FCC, so don’t expect any corporate knights in shining armor to arrive anytime soon.
In talking to several veteran indie-film producers and distributors recently for the upcoming issue of Filmmaker Magazine, there seems to be some renewed hope for focusing on old models like grassroots and very targeted theatrical distribution and keeping your budgets as low as possible—all perhaps with the help of your new friend, A.I.
But this is in service to a new reality that looks a lot like one we were living in some decades and decades ago before there was even such things as “independent film,”
”PBS,” or “social security.” Perhaps the industry—and even the world—is in the middle of a major paradigm shift, socially, politically, and technologically, that may take us far, far back to a very reactionary time.
As ITVS president and former Sundance Institute Documentary head Carrie Lozano told me, “The whole industry has to recalibrate. We have to change how we work. Whatever was before—that’s never coming back.”
Some see opportunities in this moment where many of the systems that we’ve relied on in the past are quickly eroding. Executives in the PBS system all talked to me about opportunities. But while there may be opportunities to bring in new money, supporters, and infrastructure to buttress our fragmenting institutions, there are way too many people sitting on the sidelines and accepting all of this as normal.
You: “…there are way too many people sitting on the sidelines and accepting all of this as normal.”
Me: This frustrates me more than anything else. I don’t understand it. Does the very human drive to “accept, adapt, obey, survive” override everything else? Our values, morals and ideals? What is this moment telling us, about us?
Thank you Anthony for this sobering article. The phrase that James Lantz refers to in his comment got my attention as well, because sadly it is the default for the majority when fascism clamps down on a society. My Spanish grandfather became an exile from Spain when Franco and his fascists took over there, and I grew up in dictatorships in Latin America. In all cases there was resistance from large sectors of the populace, and artists in particular, but after hundreds of thousands were assassinated, disappeared, jailed or forced into exile, the fascists settled in until their day of reckoning came. This is not to say resistance is futile and that we shouldn't find a way to keep making documentary films, we will, but the road is hard and fraught and we need to steel ourselves for the long haul. As Loira Limbal says, "they know the power of the work, which is why they are dismantling everything." Fascists never relinquish power voluntarily. Onward!