My recollection is that I first heard it years ago from Frank Stiefel, principal in the longstanding Stiefel+Company and now executive VP at @radical.media. He observed, and I’m paraphrasing, that one of the most remarkable aspects of the commercialmaking business is the inherent trust involved as a job is put into motion. On the strength of a phone call, vendors and suppliers—not yet paid and without even confirming paperwork—mobilize to get a production off the ground. They immediately commit time, energy, money and varied resources to make a concept a reality. This speaks volumes about trust and the good in the industry as working relationships form and are further cemented during the course of a project.
I often think of this dynamic when the temptation to descend into cynicism arises. While there’s plenty to be negative about—be it mean-spirited rumor mongering, a tight economy, margin squeezing, et cetera—there has perennially been a high level of trust in the production trenches.
That’s why we felt it important to recently scrutinize the plight of several in Minneapolis-St. Paul as a result of Propaganda Films’ closure last year. Propaganda went into bankruptcy not long after wrapping the production of a Nike spot, "Snowplow," in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Collectively, unsecured creditors in Minnesota are owed nearly $200,000. While that doesn’t seem a staggering amount relatively speaking in industry terms, the people left holding the bag in Minnesota have been hard hit by the situation—as detailed in our lead story last week. Coming up on 11 months since the Nike spot was filmed, creditors in Minneapolis-St. Paul still await some resolution via Propaganda’s bankruptcy proceedings in Los Angeles. At press time, it seemed likely that unsecured creditors generally would be lucky if they received cents on the dollar—if any payment, whatsoever.
But of all the feedback we elicited on the situation from Minneapolis-St. Paul artisans, an observation by Kevin Anderson, principal in KAPS, sticks in my mind. KAPS is owed some $8,000 for mobile homes, trailers and related personnel provided for the Nike job. Yet it wasn’t the money that bothered Anderson the most. Instead, he related, that the Propaganda experience has "kind of jaded the community here. The level of trust is not where it was. It’s impacted our negotiations with out-of-town companies. So much of what goes on in this business has been based on trust and a handshake—and it’s become more difficult to do that again in light of what’s happened."
Indeed, SHOOT has received dozens of phone calls from creditors of now defunct houses. The calls come from people at small support businesses that have been squeezed anyway in recent years—by runaway production, by a SAG strike that exacerbated the runaway dynamic, by attrition in production company ranks and by slow pay generally.
The bottom line is that we all should do our part to preserve the trust that has been such a positive industry mainstay. At the end of last year, a vendor gave me his take on the industry—which we published, under the condition of anonymity in this column. I talked to him last week and he said his feelings hadn’t changed. His observation was simply, "If all this continues—companies closing and leaving us holding the bag, if there’s more runaway production and a damaged economy—we in the support sector have to consider whether to stay in business; or more, directly, how we do business. Trust has always been the norm. … You front money before you receive a dime. But with all that’s happened…is it prudent to operate this way anymore? How many more times can we get burned?"
