I'll be in NYC October 6-7. If you'd like to join me and my friends from LinkedIn for a lunch/meetup (details TBD), hit reply and let me know!
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You're invited to a preview of Brotherhood - A Cinematic Musical. 6:30pm in Bluffdale Utah. I attended the first preview on Friday, Sept 17, and was blown away.
Click here to RSVP
Make It Inevitable
Read Time: 5 Minutes | Read Online
Scale turns the uncertain into the inevitable. Most filmmakers think they have a talent problem. They have a scale problem.
Early on you need to master your craft, but once you’re there, if you’re still struggling, it’s not a talent issue, or a case of bad luck. You need more attempts, more people who know you and trust you can solve their problems, and more outreach.
Most filmmakers spend years mistaking chance for strategy. They send one proposal, one email, or have one investor meeting, and then conclude “the market has spoken.” They misdiagnose the problem as a lack of talent or bad timing, when in truth it was a lack of attempts.
The risk is subtle but devastating - you stop too soon, with your work still invisible, and you decide, wrongly, that you weren’t good enough.
Early in my producing career I set out to raise money for one our feature screenplays. If I’m being generous I think I spoke to 3-5 investors total. When the rejections started piling up, I told myself the timing was off. It was 2009 after all, a justifiably bad time to raise money.
But then I saw other producers and filmmakers go into production, having raised the money for their projects at the same time. Turns out, they just didn’t stop at the first, or third, or fifth no. They had rolled the dice enough times for probability to bend in their favor.
I realized something that changed everything: I hadn't failed because I lacked talent. I'd failed because I'd mistaken a few scattered attempts for strategy.
But here's what nobody tells you about scale: it's not just about doing more. Most filmmakers who embrace this advice burn out doing more of the wrong things.
• • •
The Mathematics of Inevitability
One flip of the coin is a 50-50 chance to get the outcome you want. But if you put 1,000 people in a room, hand them each a coin, and tell them to flip, half the room will get heads and half will get tails.
The tails are told to leave, and the 500 remaining flip again. 250 are left, then 125, then 60, then 30, then 15, then 8, then 4, then 2, than 1.
In that room of 1,000 people, despite the statistics that a coin flip is 50/50, there’s one person who flipped heads 10 times in a row.
That person isn't luckier. They're not more talented. They just rolled the dice more times.
That’s inevitability from scale.
• • •
The Cost of Stopping
Every filmmaker I know has a graveyard of projects they abandoned after the first few rejections. Scripts gathering dust. Pitch decks that never made it past three meetings. Ideas that died not from lack of merit, but from lack of attempts.
The cruelest part is they'll never know how close they were. The miner stops three feet from gold. The filmmaker stops five pitches from their first investor. The writer stops three queries from their first yes.
You don't just lose the project, you lose the belief that the next one will work. Your mindset deflates and you see less and less possibility over time. Each abandoned attempt becomes evidence of your inadequacy rather than data points in an inevitable progression.
The filmmakers who win aren’t the most talented, they’re the ones who multiply their reach until success becomes inevitable.
• • •
The Threshold Effect
In every scenario there's a threshold. Cross it, and what seemed impossible becomes inevitable. If you talk to 1 distributor, the odds aren’t in your favor. If you talk to 1,000, it’s highly unlikely that you won’t end up with a distribution deal. The threshold is probably closer to 1 than it is to 1000. I’d aim for a system that gets my film in front of 100 companies, and celebrate if I discover the right partner in the first 10-20.
Most filmmakers never find their threshold. They quit at 5 attempts when their number was 50. They abandon the system at month 11 when month 12 would have changed everything.
The mathematics don't care about your timeline. Probability bends to volume, not urgency.
• • •
The Patient Mathematics
Scale doesn't guarantee success on any single attempt. But it makes success inevitable across all attempts.
The filmmakers who seem to have all the luck have simply crossed the threshold where probability works in their favor. They've rolled the dice enough times that statistics bend toward yes.
Every "overnight success" is 5-10 years of attempts in the making. Years in the shadows, building up demand, expanding their reach, collecting nos like coins until they have enough to buy their breakthrough.
The uncertain becomes inevitable through patient mathematics. Not through force or talent alone, but through the quiet persistence of trying again and again until the market has no choice but to respond.
But most won't do this. Most will stop at roll 7 when roll 8 would have changed everything. Most will quit three feet from gold, three pitches from their investor, three attempts from their threshold.
They'll blame talent. They'll blame timing. They'll blame everything except the one thing they controlled: how many times they were willing to flip the coin.
Make it inevitable.
Feeling stuck? Got questions? Then the Craftsman Films Live Call is what you need.
Every month we gather over Zoom for a live call with about a dozen filmmakers. The calls start with a principle from the MOVIE framework (that I wrote about in my last book, Blockbuster), that you can apply to your business and projects today. Then we take some questions, do a networking breakout session, then another round of live Q&A, then a second breakout session.
In 2 hours or less you'll come away with new connections, new insights, and new motivation to move your projects forward.
Join the next Craftsman Films Live Call (Wednesday 10/15 at 10am Mountain Time!)
I'll be hosting some events at the Newport Beach, AFI, and Austin Film Festivals.
If you'd like to be notified/invited, click here to signal your interest and I'll send you the details once I've got them, likely by the end of September.
This will be the best way to meet up in these locations, as there are many who want to grab a coffee or pick my brain. I'll try and make myself available for those, but these events will be the best way to connect while I'm traveling.
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Daren Smith
Blockbuster Book | Consulting | Speaking
