Setting a New Course For Cinema Studies Students:
The Business of Film
This fall saw the inauguration of the newest addition to Innis College’s curriculum, INI 228H – The Business of Film. Designed with the intention of providing CSI students with a film-oriented option for satisfying the forthcoming breadth requirement of a half-credit foregrounding quantitative reasoning, The Business of Film examines the film industry under what is perhaps its least-studied but most definitive aspect – distribution. Through a series of lectures by course instructor Paul Babiak, INI 228H traces the life-cycle of the typical film project through development and pre-production, financing and budgeting, the shoot, post-production, and marketing. The course then examines the exploitation phase in the life of a film: its subsequent releases through successive distribution windows (theatrical, home video, television, and non-theatrical release) and traces the streams of revenues as they come in (casting a sidelight on some of the more notorious practices of Hollywood accounting).
Perhaps the most outstanding feature of INI 228H has been the roster of special guest speakers, all of them well-known industry leaders, who have come in to share with the class the benefits of their experience and their insights into the specificity of film production in Canada. Independent filmmaker David Cowdery introduced the class to some of the practical realities confronting the Canadian filmmaker; Samir Lakha and Dan McMullen of the Royal Bank of Canada shed light on some of the obscurities of feature film financing; Carrie Paupst Shaughnessy of Telefilm Canada showed us the industry from the point of view of our principal government funding agency; Barry Avrich of Endeavour Marketing and Greg Mason of Disney Canada showed in their various ways how the marketing of a film can be an art in itself; Ted East of the Canadian Association of Film Distributors and Exporters and Norm Bolen of the Canadian Media Production Association reflected on the variety of ways in which film product is monetized, each giving his own perspective on the changes to the structure of the industry which may accompany digitization; David Zitzerman of Goodmans LLP, one of Canada’s most distinguished entertainment lawyers, examined the industry from the legal perspective; and finally Christina Jennings, Chairman and CEO of Shaftesbury Production came by to give a truly inspiring overview of both film and television production in Canada from the perspective of one of its great success stories.
In tutorials, students pitched ideas, formed their own production companies and drew up financial plans, forecast their revenues and calculated their ultimates – the work of each student culminating in the production of a business plan for an as-yet-unrealized proprietary film project. The term’s work was commemorated at the last class with the presentation of INI 228’s Academy Awards – named Lewies in honour of Lew Wasserman: the man who did more than any other to establish the film industry as we know it today. Celebrity presenters included teaching assistants Karly-Lynne Scott and Michael Da Silva, researcher Stacey Feero, Innis College’s own Associate Director of Advancement, Karen Papazian, and CSI’s beloved Acting Director and Professor, Kay Armatage.