Constellation Incubator was born out of a frank conversation between filmmakers Naomi McDougall Jones and Liz Manashil about the state of independent moviemaking. Manashil has experience in the distribution realm and McDougall Jones comes from the financing arena, but they both had the same observation.
“From our vantage point, we’re not seeing filmmakers leading sustainable lives,” Manashil tells MovieMaker.
McDougall Jones told Manashil that she feels like “we keep trying to put Band-Aids on a broken system,” and the pair expanded the conversation to others in their orbit, asking their filmmaker friends several questions.
“What have you seen that’s novel? Are you making money? Do you feel like you’re exhausted? Is everyone just overworking themselves?” Manashil recalls.
Perhaps the key question was this: “Why aren’t filmmakers making money?”
What they gleaned from these talks was that their thinking was not radical enough.
“All the ideas that people had were improvisations that stemmed from the Hollywood system. We were just replicating the studio system in the independent world,” Manashil says.
“And so we thought, well, other industries probably have wonderful ways they’ve adapted and pivoted in order to lead more sustainable lives and have more profitable products,” she continues. “So we’re embarking in the world of learning about designed thinking, which is essentially looking at problem-solving from a very specific point of view. And then during the incubator, we’re going to bring in experts from other industries who are going to help us iterate the film industry.”
By looking beyond “film-adjacent or art-adjacent” industries, the Constellation Incubator looks to foster a “community of independent filmmakers who can provide an alternative” to the present studio system that only “works for the people in power,” as Manashil describes.
With submissions running through this Friday on FilmFreeway, the Constellation Incubator aims to bring together 36 teams of moviemakers to develop features. The incubator is founded by Manashil and McDougall Jones, along with Angela Harmon and Abeni Bloodworth, whose bios and experience is listed on that FilmFreeway page.
“We’re not going in with a hypothesis fully formed on how this industry should function. We just feel it’s broken,” Manashil says.
(Clockwise from top left) Constellation Incubator founders Naomi McDougall Jones, Angela Harmon, Liz Manashil and Abeni Bloodworth. Main image: Liz Manashil on set.
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To comment on this excerpt: “All the ideas that people had were improvisations that stemmed from the Hollywood system. We were just replicating the studio system in the independent world,” Manashil says.
If everyone did in fact follow the Hollywood system? Then we would be making profits. Because Hollywood was a well oiled machine. They had a perfect system save for the corruption. So my advice is take the Hollywood system and build upon it don't try and amend it to what you think is fitting. Build on it and add what you want to that. You cannot expect to make it in this business unless you learn from the Masters from the 1930s to the 1990s. I have done so with my company DreamFactory Studios.