The Angel Investor
As I begin to fundraise for an upcoming film, I find myself increasingly bogged down by the prospect of marketing. Beyond social media or word-of-mouth, it’s the prospect of selling an idea, and then the idea of Saanvi Deshini. In my drafts, Saanvi Deshini is a young and aspiring writer, dedicated and unwaveringly enthused by you, the potential investor. She won’t let you down: here’s her logline, tagline, proof-of-concept, storyboard, writing samples, resume, and then some. She may be sixteen, but god, isn’t she professional?
In film, like in many other professional fields, the power to greenlight any project involves producers and investors. When money makes the world turn, investors are necessary to production. As much as I love guerrilla projects, with a Google Doc, a few friends, and a vlog camera, a feature means considering sound design, lighting, compensation, and legality more closely. So, Saanvi Deshini will send out as many emails as it takes to charm the right people.
Enter angel investors, who offer their own personal capital to fund a production. There’s a leap of faith when they agree to the initial investment, then a slew of contracts ensuring they receive a worthwhile return. Oftentimes this looks like writers ceding their rights to a script and investors being involved at every step of the filmmaking process. However it manifests, it’s the sacrifice of creative control, to some extent, in pursuit of turning a profit.
My favorite filmmakers all cite that leap of faith as the jumpstart to their careers. Checks out. I guess that’s the angel part of angel investor. Celine Song, director of Past Lives and Materialists, described the way Past Lives seemed to resonate with the right number of the right people, so she was able to strike gold with A24. It was thanks to these investors that a screenplay featuring Korean dialogue entered the Western mainstream.
Without that first investor, who decided Past Lives was worth telling even when standard screenwriting software couldn’t handle Korean characters, the film would never have come to be.
Investors also act as intermediaries between an idea and the film, with each investor’s lens reshaping the screenplay over the course of its life cycle. Between cuts, reworkings, and assortments of contingencies and liabilities, the script at the production stage can look completely different from the one pitched. Investors are the difference between a Google Doc and a screening, and part of the reason the typical screenwriter makes 2–3% of a production’s budget for their script.
So they’re like your fairy godmother: a voice offering kindness and faith in your work, but one that can also transform it into something unrecognizable.
The nature of investors in creative spaces is controversial in that way, but ultimately, it is because of them that creatives have the opportunity to survive off their work. So, I’ll keep drafting my emails, and hopefully, I, too, can find a fairy godmother of my own.
