This interview with Brian Graden and Joseph Gordon-Levitt was conducted at the 2015 ProMax Conference. Content has been edited for clarity. See part four here.
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You can watch the rest of it online, it has a beautiful ending. There were 105 individual contributions that went into that three-minute short film. I find people are still surprised when they learned that 105 of those people are actually paid because of the financial and legal frameworks that are still evolving in this arena. I know it was very important to you both as an artist and a human being to figure out how to pay and how to credit people. I think maybe you could share how you solve for that?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Sure. Well, the way that we’ve done it when we were a much smaller company was that every time we had a production that made money, we would take the profits and split them in half and half the profits would go back into our company and the other half of the profits would go to all the different contributing artists.
When figuring out which of those contributing artists got paid and how much we tried to figure out a formula, we realized there is no formula for this. We have to just kind of go one at a time and really assess it. That’s what we do and that’s what we still do actually. We go one person at a time and figure out that little illustration that they did, what percentage of the short film does that account for? We put those proposals on our sites and say “here’s what we propose, or the profit splits, what do you guys think?”
We give the community a chance to give feedback on those proposals, then we’ll make adjustments, and then we make the final call. We’re upfront about how the process of doing a television show. We’re different though because television shows don’t go into profit right away, they take usually years. I didn’t want to wait years to pay people and so what we did was we earmarked a pretty significant chunk of our episodic budget -- $50,000 each budget -- to pay the contributing artists.
That is something that I think is also important in general. As we move forward into crowdsourcing or open collaboration or whatever you want to call it, when you’re opening up this process and allowing people to come through the internet and contribute to something that’s going to make money, you should pay the people. I think it’s crucial.
Actually, I thought the notion of transparency was fascinating because imagine if you are at your office and they posted everybody's proposed salary, and then you got to debate it for two weeks. Somehow it actually works and I also find that a lot of HitRecorders will post pictures of themselves with their check -- almost as a badge of honor -- which I think is as important as the money itself.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
It’s really true. The thing was never motivated by money and no one’s really coming to our community trying to get rich. It’s really moving when you see it. It happens a lot where people will post photos or videos of themselves with their check saying “this is the first time I’ve ever been paid for something I did,” and you know, “I showed my parents this and it really means something to me,” and that means something to me -- that this company can provide that opportunity for people.
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Please see part six of the interview here.