Organizational Partnerships

I sought to partner with a few social-justice oriented organizations, but nothing concrete materialized (Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Trans Lifeline, and GLAAD, who was a source of general support in the form of including Man Made in blasts, lists, social media, etc). It seems that one is so completely and constantly in the weeds at every stage of an indie film’s production that there is little spare time to pursue non-production-related opportunities and devote the kind of time required to connect with fruitful partners in a meaningful way. In retrospect, I wish I’d had a part-time PA or producer to devote resources to this area, because I think it’s a missed opportunity for a film like this in particular to reach more communities who might’ve enjoyed knowing about it.

Corporate Sponsorships

At one point we were talking to a U.S.-based international liquor and beverage company about potential sponsorship to help with finishing funds (this was something that was presented to my producing partner, Roadside Entertainment). While we were in discussions about the opportunity, the initiative changed focus, and we were lucky to receive another type of foundational support (the Sundance Documentary Film Program grant, see the next section).

Foundational, Investor, Crowdfunding Support

We received a Sundance Documentary Film Program grant for the film, which was funded by The Sundance Institute (along with the Arcus, Just Films, and Open Society Foundations). I applied to several foundations before, during, and after production, but Sundance was the only one that awarded us funding.

In addition to the Sundance Institute funding, both myself and Roadside provided funds upfront (mainly for filming). Our EP Téa Leoni offered funding as well.

I used fiscal sponsor Creative Visions (an organization I heard about through a fellow filmmaker, at a time when I wasn’t yet working with TFC and thus didn’t know there was an opportunity to use them as a fiscal sponsor). Ultimately, we took in about $35K in tax-deductible donations through fiscal sponsorship, raised through e-mail blasts, social media, and reaching out to personal friends who were invested in helping this film get finished and find its way into the world.

We also had a rough-cut screening/fundraiser at SoHo House in NYC, the costs for which were donated by a friend/supporter of the project.

Speaking Engagements and Fees

I have been to a handful of colleges and universities with the film. They pay a screening fee, as well as a small speaking fee (and cover travel). Depending on how long the visit, and how many classes I speak with, I sometimes also speak about my (literary) writing at colleges (if say, an English/Creative Writing department co-sponsors my visit with Film/Media Studies at whatever university. Before I started making films, I was—am!—a novelist and nonfiction writer).

The film was also accepted on the Southern Circuit of Independent Films, which enabled me, as the director, to travel with the film for one month, taking it to small towns and colleges/universities and other venues throughout the Southern U.S.

Ancillary

I self-funded Man Made T-shirts and sold them on the festival circuit and through the film’s website (or gave them to donors to the film). I’m pretty sure I didn’t break even on this venture—it was more to help get the word out about the film—and the T-shirts are still available on our website! (They’re soft and dope-looking.)

Revenue Analysis

Film Festival Revenue: Man Made earned a little less than $25K on the festival circuit, playing at over 70 festivals between mid-2018 and the end of 2019. One international booking scheduled in 2020 was canceled due to the pandemic.

Pretty certain we won’t ever find ourselves in the black on this project, but of course we’re hoping it has a long tail and will continue to be sold and screened in the years to come. To date, we have earned approximately $6K in our deal with Journeyman, and COVID-19 has seemed to put a serious damper on educational opportunities, though Frameline is continuing to work in this space and is in the process of getting the film onto Kanopy—they have made a few educational sales to date. (Roadside and I are equal partners, so we split everything that we recoup.)

Takeaways

In most ways I wouldn’t change much, because I feel like I learned a ton and made the best film I could make with the tools and skills and budget I had available to me at the time I was making it. I learned and grew so much, out of sheer necessity as various needs popped up throughout the entire journey, so in retrospect I can’t really envision it unfolding any other way than it did. Furthermore, the film is a success as a creative project, and is doing what I wanted it to do in that it is moving and changing people who see it in some way, even if not on as wide of a scale as we’d originally hoped.

But if I had to do it over again, there are some things I might have changed—for example, the funding/fundraising process. I probably should have tried to secure some of the private funding I ended up securing before embarking upon the type of making/filming/production that this film required—i.e., traveling to so many different parts of the country to follow these subjects. I was essentially fundraising as I went, sometimes week-to-week, trip-to-trip, which didn’t allow me to focus fully (or even primarily) on the filmmaking itself.

I would also perhaps have tried to raise or specifically dedicate funds to have at least one person helping me when I shot, whether it was a PA, or someone even nominally skilled in, for example , running audio or handling other production tasks like securing releases/locations, equipment, driving, booking travel, etc. I took one of my daughters on a day of shooting with a secondary subject in the Bronx, and even that amount of production support was invaluable—unpaid labor! Not for nothing, this daughter also composed what is for all intents and purposes the theme song for the film’s soundtrack, which is beautiful and I’m so grateful to have in the film.

I think there is good and bad that came from my shooting about 85% of this film myself. Mostly good, which comes from the intangible “magic” moments that materialized while spending so much time with the subjects, and that I was able to capture on camera because it was just me rolling wherever life took them. On the other hand, there were things I likely missed because I was effectively producing, directing, DP-ing, running audio, camera, and asking questions, setting up interviews, scheduling, etc. For most of the shoots, I did them solo (which was almost all of them, outside of the bodybuilding competitions, which co-producer Lauren Griswold at Roadside helped me with on the producing side, which was invaluable). So, the quality of some of what I shot solo was naturally lowered, and I missed things that I know would’ve been helpful to have later in edit (i.e., storytelling solutions I missed having on hand—of course we had no budget for pick-ups).  

Another thing I also would do differently is not show a rough cut of the film to my major funder before it was ready to be seen by anybody outside of our production team. While they assured me that they understood the nature of a rough-cut and just hoped to offer feedback on one of their supported films, I feel like I probably exposed it too soon, before it was anywhere near ready for outside eyes, and because it was in such a rough/vulnerable state, it was perhaps more easily dismissed later as not festival-ready, which in retrospect likely could’ve hurt the film’s chances to find a broadcast or streamer sale in the long-run. Perhaps it is just my imagination—but I think I exposed my rough cut too soon.

With any film about a marginalized or underrepresented community, I feel, there can be  whiff of, “yeah, but will it matter to mainstream audiences?” I think that these types of films (often social justice projects in general) very quickly get stamped as one of two things: 1) “elevated” to the status of mainstream-ready; or, more often, 2) shunted into a festival run that more directly serves the community already represented in the film.

I’m not trying to suggest that queer- or black- or trans- or women-centered festivals (and the like) are not as important, or vital to the world of filmmaking on the whole (they are likely more important), but rather, I’m suggesting that perhaps being pre-sorted into, “Oh, this is a LGBTQ film,” or that’s an “Asian film” (whatever the case may be), rather quickly sends a film down a certain path, one that doesn’t always involve the high-profile mainstream festivals, which ends up directly affecting that film’s chances for gaining the kind of attention necessary to get picked up for broadcast and/or theatrical release.

I believe that films like these (about marginalized or under-represented communities), are precisely what mainstream audiences should be exposed to more—alongside the top-selling, more requisite films about or involving celebrities or well-known subjects, historical events, crimes, etc.

As far as what I might want filmmakers to learn from this case study, it would be to take what might be helpful, and throw away the rest, like any “advice” one receives in life. The main revelation I had along the way, in fact, is that there is no single path for an indie documentary passion-project like this. What may work for one project might not work for another. I had thought that there were a few different set paths for films, and at some point you would find your film going down one them, and there would be sign-posts that help guide you, or give you some suggestions about how fast to drive, where to turn, or in other words, how to safely arrive at your destination. On my particular path, however, there wasn’t a ton of that signage. Even with some deeply-appreciated—and at times do-or-die—institutional support, and a number of instances of my reaching out for advice/help/thoughts from friends and contacts along the way, at a certain point, it just hit me that we were just going to have to figure it all out on our own, make the best decisions possible with the whatever information was available at the time.

Through the entire five-year process, I learned that each and every film literally forges its own singular path, almost as though each project has its own fingerprint. There are not going to be clear signposts, signals, or guard-rails, and if you believe in your project, you will just end up doing whatever it is you have to do at any fork in the road to get the thing made and eventually seen by people who want (and in some cases need) to see it.

There were dozens of reasons to quit making this film every single day, starting with a lack of funding, all the way down to a culture at large that fundamentally doesn’t care about the lives and people portrayed in the film. So, I suppose the main advice is: don’t give up, because there will be a million reasons to do so throughout the process. Filmmaking is a marathon—no, a triathlon—and definitely not a sprint.

TFC Takeaways

The Film Collaborative is really grateful to T Cooper for being so forthcoming, both in terms of his willingness to participate in our case study program and for providing such a heartfelt account of his journey with the film.

There are two things here that could use a bit of contextualization. The first is that we see many projects where the filmmakers are disappointed at not getting into A-list or more high-level mainstream festivals. Yet not all of them have the LGBTQ film festival circuit to “fall back on”…and we do not mean that in a pejorative sense, we simply mean that the LGBTQ festival niche can be heavily monetized and it makes no sense for a filmmaker not to avail their film of the LGBTQ festivals. Having built-in interest is a good thing because if no one knows about your film, hearts and minds will never be changed. A niche festival circuit helps build awareness, even if in the short term one feels like they are preaching to the choir. In the long term, one hopes that their film will be discovered by more of the masses than it was allowed to on festival circuit. There are scores of niche-less films that don’t get to have this.

The second is that while 2018 is less than three years ago, a lot has changed. In 2021, trans representation is more visible than ever—in movies, TV shows, state legislatures, and now in the White House, with the recent news that Biden has nominated a transgender physician as assistant health secretary. But in 2018, if you recall, many in the LGBTQ community were still using the somewhat didactic term “FTM,” something we have thankfully moved on from. And while the existence of trans men was certainly known, the awareness of the many ways that trans men can present in the world was not as great as it is just a few short years later—and the idea that there might be only one slot in a program for a trans film in mainstream festival is no longer really true. Most programmers now realize that there are many stories to tell, and although they would never program, for example, two trans bodybuilding films in the same edition of a festival any more than they would program two similar stories of any type, they are also less likely to lump trans films as a whole into a single category, as if they were checking some sort of diversity box. And hopefully, Man Made has contributed to this widening of perspective that will make future filmmakers looking to tell trans stories feel a little less pigeonholed.

TL;DR

Part of T Cooper’s success with Man Made is undoubtedly the authenticity of the storytelling: “100% trans-made trans storytelling.” Creatively, he has no regrets, although if he had to do it all over again he would have improved the way the film was funded (less on-the-fly money) so that he could perhaps not have to constantly “do it all.” He feels that would have improved the final product with more production support. In terms of his goal of reaching hearts and minds, he could not hide a bit of disappointment at being sucked into the sort-of LGBTQ film circuit rabbit hole a bit too quickly, as he questioned how many hearts and minds would be changed if one were just showing the film to folks who were already drinking the Kool Aid. However, with the help of Journeyman Pictures, and the handful of additional international broadcast deals it secured, and being able to participate in the Southern Circuit of Independent Films, the film will undoubtedly be circulated for years to come. So while the film may not ever be in the black financially, future trans stories will owe a debt of gratitute to Man Made for its pioneering spirit and authenticity.