MISSION STATE
CREATIVITY FIRST FILMS
The film industry isn’t dying by premeditated murder or from old age; it’s dying from a strange affliction that is half suicide and half starvation. The industry is starving for the creative freedom that made it great, and the agency and studio executives are inducing suicide in the same way the devil whispers in the ear of otherwise virtuous artists and business people.
There’s no doubt that few film executives running Studios care about anything but their Christmas bonuses and golden parachutes. The race to score big budgets within three years is the goal – to hell with the stockholders and to hell with what inspires audiences to come to the movies.
While most of the reasons why Hollywood’s system is broken can be fixed with corrections to acquisition of I.P. and fair deals, there are several issues that can only be solved by Blockchain use within the system. As proven by Maersk with IBM’s logistics system, as well as Blockchain platforms ensuring legit shares of royalties and advertising revenue in the music industry, Blockchain delivers the revenue usually “stolen” by the studios, agencies, or producers (usually unreported revenue or side deals.) Only Creativity First Films working with Pillars of Encryption (Crypto-Integrity-Tao tech) has the knowledge and position to do this, and others will innovate their systems after seeing proof it pays off. The launch of this new era required years of experience in Asia, Europe, and Hollywood, as well as patience for the optimum timing. Never before has Hollywood been so desperate and so in need of reform that many top executives will accept paradigm shifts back to more ethical financial and booking systems. Otherwise, the entire industry will never, ever recover – it will be impossible for it to regain the health it had twenty years ago, or even three years ago.
This C.F.F. system will become the healthier norm for finance deals and greater revenue rewards being returned to the artists. Currently, film deals are set up for studios and corrupt players to withhold revenue and “engage in creative accounting.” And the artisans are the ones that suffer. Financial manipulations for funding and distributing revenue have all but closed out the films that actors and actresses dreamed to star in.
The audience for these high-caliber movies (many of them true life stories of inspiration) is still there. Studios blame advertising budgets for making it impossible to release films from $12-40 million. They couldn’t pull off this con without the help of agencies selling out their clients and poisoning development. Studios, agents, entertainment attorneys contributed to the demise of films by forming a de facto “racket’. Few films are. being made by creative people with the artistic integrity considered first. And the audiences of the world can feel it … they can smell it, especially families and the older populations that will still pay for the group experience of being morally moved by watching a film in a theater. It is essential to society to continue the transformative and motivating impact of collective storytelling.
Half the corrections relate to Inflated budgets and advertising that result in higher theater seat prices. Families, older people on fixed incomes – in fact most of middle America – cannot justify spending $125 for four people to watch a film and enjoy popcorn. Other dishonest practices like cross-collateralizing losses, contracts slyly written to dupe investors, and lopsided foreign revenue on merchandise, music, and theme park rides sicken production and distribution outside the United States market.
Television Networks are so top-heavy with executives and the system for approval is so convoluted that it’s nearly impossible to produce original series. Closure of just the contracts aspects of a launch for a series can take 3-9 months. Then comes Development, which involves way too many executives that have nothing to do with either delivering a good story or making it possible to shoot a top quality episode in the determined shooting schedule. Without an iota of creativity among them, these executives look for fail-safes that no longer guarantee the success of a series: a known star that drags out negotiations for months, Directors for the Pilots that are manipulated by agencies, and refusing to go with new writers that created the dream project to begin with. Then comes the big bottleneck. Series are approved based upon a Show Runner being signed on. Good luck: Agencies maintain an artificial shortage of them to centralize power and maximize television budgets while reducing the profit share in syndication. If that wasn’t enough to kill Television, the short-term profits of Reality Shows ended the golden age of global syndication payoffs for series that raked in billions on the 3 and 5-year rounds.
On top of that, Hollywood simply lost sight of its true purpose, which is to entertain and inspire individual search for “meaning” through the art of film and the audio-visual medium. Countless people internationally complained that Hollywood wasn’t turning out film stories that they wanted to see enough to go to the theaters. Comic book movies are fine for visual highs, but seldom inspire self-awareness or improvement; and the vicarious and visceral aspects of engaging in a film are lost in these genres. One reason Hollywood ruled the world of film was because the world wanted to watch “Americans being Americans” because it inspired them, related to them in their own culture, gave them hope, and centered around meta-motivation, “agency,” awe of the real world and human societies, and belief.
Yet, this can all be replaced by a healthier system that rewards both the talent (craving rich roles to perform) and investors (that want R.O.I. that justifies the risks of investing in Entertainment.) Actually, the idea that investing in Entertainment is very high risk is not based entirely on truth – it has to include the fraud of Hollywood and the greed of dealmakers for most films to “not break even.” This truth includes the infamous phrase, “Monkey Points.” Creativity First Films is the first to give the top billing Actors and Screenwriters a share of Gross Profits (something they tried to negotiate with for decades.) Now it is even more important with all the new tech revenue streams, which all have to be counted on a ledger.
One good sign is the breakup of C.A.A., and the formation of the new management company called Range Media Partners. This shows that agents with more ethics will serve talent better and make a fortune due to this. C.F.F. looks forward to jumpstarting Hollywood by presenting this company with a first look at a source of high-value content that is not linked to any other Agency, Studio, or other negatives. Their fresh start jives with our fresh start, and we give content and Asian access. Considering that C.A.A. still is stuck with the WGA problems, and it is hard to get safe content that is not bound by previous agreements of agency attachments, Creativity First Films presents just about the only big treasure chest of projects that can be launched without fear of future legal entanglements. No writers in the Creativity First Films roster are WGA, but the people doing any polishes on the scripts will be WGA and should be free to write on them. In addition, since the I.P. will be owned by the Singapore studio hub, that also ensures that the negotiations are not interfering with the WGA or unions here in Hollywood.
Blockchain DLT will impact the world of advertising, making fraudulent advertising costs almost impossible. And Blockchain Smart Contracts linked to online viewing will reduce piracy and help deliver honest box office receipts worldwide. Those two categories alone increase revenue for the original major funding source by million, if not tens of millions of dollars. Suddenly movies are more profitable, and investor returns come first … ahead of agency percentages and excessive studio executive salaries. That quickly evolves into an environment that gives us a chance to deliver what we promised actors for decades: a percentage of gross box office revenue as a standard, not as the exception.
Yet, Blockchain isn’t the solitary solution for returning Hollywood to glory and the creation of “something out of nothing.” Making a film is a confluence of dozens of creative people and their energy. It’s glorious and the challenge beyond measure, yet it can happen a couple hundred times a year. But now we must be honest about how sick the movers and shakers transformed our beloved art of acting, Directing, and cinematography. If things don’t change the concept of sharing a powerful story with strangers en masse – watching a film in a theater instead of almost alone in a house – this concept will lose its delivery of meaning because we prevented the investment from showing its payoff. And the payoff is GRAND.
Imagine Hollywood like the old taxi cab service. It started out well, served for decades with honorable quality, but then insiders created a web of fraud and monopoly control, corrupted the value of medallions, thereby forcing riders to suffer. Then came Uber. At first, the taxi companies and unions fought it, politicians in their pocket slowed it, but ultimately what the riders wanted won out. The same will happen with the Uber-izing of Hollywood. Actors and Directors will get the projects they want to create, and the audiences will cheer and go to theaters for the new generation of films and theater experiences. Remember, we are only a year or so away from mass entertainment in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality theater experiences, and the system has to be returned to a healthy status, or this new experience will fall short of the vision and goals of edge technology.
Shared experiences, in which emotions and imagination rule, are essential to the health of a culture. “The power of story” … isn’t that what the fantastic Game of Thrones came down to? It won hundreds of millions of fans on the power of story. We all speak about transforming society, and movies can do that, even if a comedy is just lifting the spirits of otherwise morose and suicidal people. The meritocracy of life hides in the shadows of our workdays but can explode into its deserved glory in a movie theater and sweep everyone up in the idea that they too can capture magic and dreams. “The power of story” will be far more influential with the new Apple V.R. Goggles and any Metaverse. This all needs to be monetized.
Creativity First Films is the culmination of living through 30 years of Hollywood, knowing how the games are played, and determining which games are healthy for the revival of the industry. And yes, there are some games that still deserve to be played, such as the uncertainty of success, the competition for top roles, the adoration of stars that need creative nourishment to patch over their inner demons. It’s impossible for fans to imagine the challenge of living a rewarding and moral life while in public. And a key defense for personal ruin is this romanticized passion of the art defies explanation … and the magic required to deliver an immortal film eludes us the harder we try to tame and harness it. The daily spectacle of making a film truly is lightning in a bottle, that needs a touch of madness to hold faith in.
As they say so often while accepting awards, it all starts with the script and that is based on a concept or story. Creativity First Films accumulated the essential screenplays and Pilots until there were enough to force a paradigm change in deal making. The deal making then had to be reinforced with new technological ways of reducing costs and rewarding artists. All this had to happen before a solution can “deliver.”
The Mission Statement is to bring all these tangent truths together to breathe new life, new spirit, new faith in the arts involved with making cinematic pieces, whether sitcoms or 2-hour epic films.
The passion and thrills in making a film are the first rewards going to the investors and participants in the project. The second round of rewards comes from teasers and getting fans hyped up over who they love to see and what they’ve been tracking on the Internet. Then finally the “shareable” reward: the release of the film or series that delivers the visceral and cerebral rewards to – well — to “people “… not an “audience.”
These are “people” we intend to reward. Every person you walk by is facing a challenge consuming unto them that is as hard to get a grip on as the most romanticized hero journeys in our films. We must remember each person is unique, each is drawn to life stories for complex individual reasons, and each deserves to embrace stories that make them feel less alone and more inspired, to lift them to be virtuous and have hope, to share an experience in a theater. When they do, they remember that being born with consciousness and special levels of communication fills us with a desire to socialize and feel the swell of emotions that emanate from our purest virtues, like protecting the weak, overcoming inner demons, falling in love, making people laugh, and hearing that laughter.
Creativity First Films is delivering the fundamentals of this instantly in scripts and will commit to this. Half the veterans of Hollywood will mock this new systems, half will exhale in relief that finally someone had a vision stronger than the powers of our industry’s recent self-destruction – and held the “Deliverables” that prove it is time, this is healthy, and the profits real.
Please visit the website crypto-integrity-tao.com to realize how vast a coordination of art, sciences, and will was required to save the awe-inspiring art of “entertainment.”
BLOCKCHAIN’S ROLE IN THE “UBER-IZING” OF HOLLYWOOD
Hollywood is broke. Far more important is, Hollywood is broken. Blockchain will fix three of the greatest problems in film financing and producing: 1) Piracy, 2) I.P. Theft, 3) fake budgets and advertising costs that prevent the original investors from receiving a larger share of the profits. Blockchain softwares ensuring this are already available by outside companies, yet need to be incorporated into the projects from the beginning, which requires the studio holding the original screenplays understands and utilizes all that has been innovated. Only “Crypto-Integrity-Tao” has the content, knowledge, and clear road ahead to do this – quickly, all of Hollywood productions will adapt to this, just like they adapted to digital cameras. The highest financial rewards will go to the investors that recognized first that this innovation is the future and produce projects on the first round, just like the first Netflix series stood out the greatest and made the first big returns for stockholders and investors/creators of Netflix.
So what is the state of Hollywood, mid-2020? Pretty bad.
In 2019, investigations revealed Agencies betrayed their clients, leading to lawsuits and strikes, with over 8,000 writers firing their agents. Writers Guild suing Agencies. Agencies bluffing. Staff of Agencies breaking confidentiality rules and snitching on their bosses/CEO’s.
The Studio system that made Hollywood great is gone, replaced by conglomerates that also are being investigated for corrupt practices. Their top-heavy system led to the near-bankruptcy of Paramount Studios, Sony Studios, Fox Studios, and even Warner Brothers is having financial problems. Only Disney and Universal are strong, and they both announced they are only producing half as many films as last year, and canceled almost every single expensive agreement with top Producers. Their system is collapsing, even around the best studios.
Netflix announced they will run out of new Original Content in 2020. Amazon and Apple challenge Netflix in acquiring new material, which is limited due to Agency problems. No one wants to enter into a big deal film or show and find out that it violated rules and will be caught up in lawsuits by the WGA.
A wise entertainment industry leader once said, Hollywood isn’t just sick, it’s sick of itself.
And then as if this crippling reality wasn’t enough, a real sickness – COVID – shut down Hollywood. Some states are opening up for production, but the Unions, always eager to extort more money, refuse to allow this re-opening until they negotiate for more money.
Never before has Hollywood been so vulnerable to a fundamental change to its outdated systems and corrupt practices.
Creativity First Films is based in Florida for many reasons. It has one of the greatest I.P. Rights Courts in the world. It’s politically neutral, and culturally diverse and healthy. Foreign Original Content that has no previous legal agreements with a U.S. company is exempt from future union lawsuits, and the paralyzing financial risks of trying to jumpstart production based on the old Hollywood system. In addition, Florida and PWC can act as an arbitrator in the deals that set up healthier deal terms for investing Studios and Funds. This requires that the first contracts on the projects (acquisition of screenplays) are signed in Florida. Once that is completed, Florida becomes a de facto powerful “hub” Studio for all Entertainment.
“Crypto-Integrity-Tao” and Creativity First Films saw this coming in 2015, when the founder began writing the big book THE FUTURE OF HOLLYWOOD FILM, MEDIA, + FINANCE. All the current lawsuits, discoveries of corruption, betrayal of foreign partners, and opportunity to reform Media were presented in that 250 page book. For years, Creativity First Films has been acquiring a very large library of 62 feature films, 17 television series, and 11 Streaming shows. The plan is simple – to go back to a system of production that worked from 1970-2000, that honestly built-out Hollywood and provided decades of top quality art in profitable entertainment.