I used to think a strong meeting meant I had done my job.

If they leaned forward, asked good questions, laughed in the right places, and said they loved the project, I left feeling like something had moved.

Sometimes it had.

Often, it hadn’t.

What I eventually understood was that the meeting was not the whole pitch.

No, it was something more: the handoff.

The real test began after I left, when someone else had to explain the project without me in the room.

That person might have been a producer, an executive, a rep, an assistant, or the one person in the meeting who genuinely wanted it to survive. They had to carry the idea into another conversation with people who had not felt the energy in the room, heard my delivery, or understood all the context.

And that is where some of my projects lost oxygen.

The person liked the idea but could not explain it cleanly.

They understood why I cared, but could not tell their boss why the company should care (which is probably one of the only things on the boss’s mind).

They felt the emotional promise, but did not have the words to defend the risk.

I had created enthusiasm, but not always transfer.

That distinction changed the way I think about pitching.

A pitch is not complete when the room understands the plot. It is complete when someone in the room can repeat it accurately and persuasively after I leave.

It requires a version of the project that can survive the handoff.

Your listener should leave with three things.

What It Is

They do not need the full plot.

They do not need every theme, subplot, piece of mythology, or reason you have been carrying the project for years.

They need a clean handle.

What is the format?

What is the genre?

Who is at the center?

What pressure drives the story?

For example:

“It’s a contained horror thriller about a locksmith hired to open a sealed apartment in a building scheduled for demolition. Inside, every room is a perfect copy of a different missing person’s home—and the last room belongs to his daughter…”

That gives the listener enough structure to repeat the project without reducing it to mush.

This is not about making the idea simplistic.

It is about making it transferable.

If someone needs five minutes to explain what the project is, the handoff is already becoming fragile.

Before the meeting ends, ask yourself:

Could this person describe my project clearly to someone who has never met me?

If the answer is no, give them the sentence.

You can even say:

“If you were describing this internally, the simplest version might be…”

Then tell them.

Why It Matters Now

This is not the generic “why now?” answer where every project is described as timely, urgent, and more relevant than ever.

The listener needs to understand the present pressure the story touches.

What is happening in the culture, the audience, or the industry that makes this project feel necessary now?

Maybe people are already living inside the question.

Maybe an old conflict has taken on a new form.

Maybe the audience has changed while the industry is still speaking to an outdated version of it.

Maybe the story gives people language for something they already feel but cannot yet name.

A useful version might sound like:

“This matters now because people increasingly feel their private lives being watched, copied, and stored by systems they cannot see—and this film turns that fear into a physical nightmare.”

That gives the project urgency without pretending it was ripped from this morning’s headlines.

It also helps the person carrying it answer the inevitable internal question:

Why should we move on this now instead of placing it on a list and forgetting about it?

Why It Can Move

This is where many pitches stop too early.

The room understands the project.

They understand why it matters.

But they still do not see how it becomes real.

“Why it can move” is the practical path.

Who is the first audience?

What makes the production achievable?

What kind of talent could respond to it?

Where does it belong?

What is the next attachment, introduction, or decision that would materially advance it?

You do not need to claim certainty.

You need to show direction.

For example:

“It can move because it is contained at a responsible budget, gives one actor a strong central role, and enters through an audience already following stories about thei personal histories and information being swept up and catalogued by large institutions they feel powerless against.”

Now the listener has something they can defend.

They know the creative proposition.

They know the cultural reason.

They know the first practical path.

That does not guarantee the project moves.

Nothing does.

But it gives the person who likes it a way to fight for it.

Before your next meeting, write down three sentences:

This is what the project is.

This is why it matters now.

This is why it can move.

Then test them on someone who has not lived inside the project with you.

Ask them to repeat it back.

If they cannot, the problem may not be the project.

The handoff may simply need more work.

Getting the meeting is access.

Making the project travel after you leave is the job.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, journalist, and director of Creative Force. PitchCraft publishes from the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and the work of building things that matter.

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Maybe I’m trying to find my center again by writing this.

That’s probably the honest place to start.

Because I’m not standing outside the blast radius here. I was part of this machine. A middle sized part, but definitely front row. I sat in those rooms. I learned the language. I learned how to talk about risk while rarely taking one. I learned how to make fear sound professional. I learned how to say “the market” when what I really meant was, “Real, actual people won’t like this and I can’t defend it.”

So no, this is not a sermon from some clean moral hilltop.

It’s an autopsy.

And I’m on the table too.

I’ve learned that institutions do not collapse when corruption enters.

It’s all about reality.

They collapse when reality can no longer reach the center.

That is the wound.

Not greed.

Not bad taste.

Not cowardice, though there’s plenty of that lying around.

Those are symptoms.

The disease is the loss of reality.

At some point, a company stops seeing itself clearly. The reports get softened. The forecasts get massaged. The bad news gets delayed, reframed, buried, or turned into a prettier deck.

No one has to say, “Lie to me.”

They don’t need to.

The organism learns.

People figure out what power wants to hear.

Then they bring that.

Again and again and again and again.

Until the center is no longer governing the actual company, the actual audience, the actual market, the actual culture, or the actual work.

It’s governing a simulation.

That is where Hollywood is now.

Not because every executive is a tyrant.

Because the system has taught too many of us that telling the truth is professionally dangerous.

The Distortion Field

The modern entertainment company is wrapped in a distortion field.

Every meeting edits reality just a little.

Every deck edits it just a little more.

Every internal read, every strategy memo, every “we love this but...,” every piece of corporate language designed to make fear sound like this thoughtful idea.

I know this because I’ve done it.

I have been in the room where bad news became “a positioning challenge.”

Where a dead project became “not quite there yet.”

Where audience disinterest became “a discoverability problem.”

Where nobody wanted to admit the thing didn’t work because too many people had already blessed it.

By the time reality reaches the center, it has been washed, folded, and made safe for people who do not want to be surprised.

The movie did not fail.

It “underperformed.”

Nobody knows what works.

So we “lean into proven IP.”

Artists are losing trust.

So we launch a “creator-first initiative.”

The language gets smoother as the room gets sicker, and that’s how institutions protect themselves from the truth.

The Autoimmune Disease

Healthy institutions have immune systems.

People who can say no.

People who can contradict power.

People who can bring ugly facts into the room before the ugly facts become fatal and cost them their jobs.

A healthy studio needs people who can say:

This movie is dead.

This audience does not exist.

This star doesn’t bring what you think they bring.

This franchise is out of blood.

This budget is insane.

That is institutional health.

But sick institutions reverse the immune system.

They start attacking reality instead of protecting the body.

Honesty becomes disloyalty.

Bad news becomes negativity.

Taste becomes “subjective.”

Experience becomes “resistance to change.”

The person telling the truth becomes the problem.

Not the broken system.

Not the bad strategy.

The truth-teller.

That is the autoimmune disease of Hollywood.

The body mistakes reality for threat.

What I Learned In The Machine

Most executives did not create the distortion field, but rather, they inherited it

Then they learned to survive inside it.

It’s how the machine works.

The younger executive learns quickly which truths move upward and which truths end careers. You learn what kind of passion is useful. You learn how to praise risk while quietly pushing everything toward the safest possible version of itself.

You learn the court language.

Elevated, premium, four-quadrant, auteur-driven.

No one knows what half of this bullshit means anymore.

That is the point.

The language lets everyone sound serious while avoiding the simpler question:

Is this even alive?

I learned that language and I used it.

And I don’t think I fully understood how much it was changing me while I was using it.

That’s the thing about institutions. They don’t just tell you what to do. They teach you what to notice. What to ignore. What to soften. What to call “strategy” when your gut knows it is fear.

Are They Tyrants?

Some are.

Let’s not be precious.

Some people enjoy power. Some enjoy saying no. Some enjoy making artists wait, bend, explain, shrink, flatter, and beg. Some have mistaken proximity to taste for taste itself.

But most are not tyrants in the old sense.

They are functionaries inside a frightened institution.

Which may be worse.

A tyrant knows he is ruling.

A functionary can destroy something while believing he is protecting it.

A functionary can starve a culture while saying the market demanded it.

That is the more useful indictment.

Not that Hollywood is run by monsters.

That would let everyone off too easily.

The indictment is that Hollywood built a professional class trained to survive reality by editing it.

And I was trained too.

That is the part I have to sit with.

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What This Does To Artists

This does not just create bad business.

It changes the artist.

Artists start pre-editing themselves before anyone asks.

They make the work smaller in the pitch, cleaner in the deck, and safer in the room.

They learn to anticipate the institutional allergy and remove the dangerous thing before the company has to reject it.

That is the real damage.

It’s not rejection; rejection is normal.

The deeper damage is when the artist begins carrying the institution’s fear inside their own creative process and calls it professionalism. Or even sadder, failure.

That is how the distortion field spreads.

First the company stops receiving reality.

Then the artist stops making from it.

And this is another place where I feel implicated

Because I have given those notes.

I have asked for the cleaner version.

I have wondered whether the room would buy the safer shape.

I have watched something alive get translated into something acceptable.

Sometimes I fought it.

Sometimes I didn’t.

That’s the truth from where I sat for those decades.

The First Casualty

The first casualty of power is accurate information.

That is true in politics, corporations, studios, etc.

It is true anywhere people learn that bad news is dangerous and obedience is rewarded.

Eventually, everyone edits reality before passing it upward.

Then the people at the center make decisions based on a world that no longer exists.

And the rest of us are expected to live with the consequences.

The Way Back

Hollywood does not need better slogans.

It does not need another creator-first panel moderated by someone who has never risked rent on a cut.

It does not need more brand language about boldness from companies addicted to safety.

It needs reality to reach the center again.

That means executives who can hear the truth without punishing the person who brought it.

It means companies with enough institutional confidence to say yes before consensus makes the answer obvious.

It means artists who stop sanding themselves down for rooms that may never be brave enough to deserve the work.

It means producers, filmmakers, writers, and creators building enough independence that a single frightened center is no longer the only place reality has to travel.

And maybe, for some of us, it means admitting what the machine taught us.

Admitting where we participated.

Admitting where we benefited.

Admitting where we protected the room instead of the work.

Because once an institution loses the ability to perceive reality, it becomes vulnerable to anyone who promises certainty.

That is where we are.

A town full of uncertainty.

A business desperate for certainty.

An executive class trained to confuse control with leadership.

And artists carrying the very reality the institution claims to want.

So are they tyrants?

Sometimes.

But the bigger problem is not tyranny.

The bigger problem is that Hollywood has become an institution where reality gets treated like a threat before it reaches the people with power.

And no institution survives that forever.

Maybe I’m writing this because I want Hollywood to find its center again.

Maybe I’m writing it because I’m trying to find mine.

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Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, showrunner, journalist, and development executive. PitchCraft publishes dispatches from the intersection of storytelling, and the business of making things. Subscribe now and get updates in your inbox every week.

’s post yesterday cracked something in me. Something inside me broke.

A Rebellious Life with Jen Esposito

I Don't Feel Anything Either.

I’m not sure this is how Gwyneth meant it when she was asked how she was feeling about the current climate, but I don’t feel anything either…

Read more

22 days ago · 51 likes · 19 comments · Jennifer Esposito

Not because I disagreed with it or found it in any way of the mark.

But because I think she said the thing underneath everything.

The thing a lot of us have been walking around with, pretending is just fatigue, or burnout, or market adjustment, or “the business changing.” But it’s deeper than that. It’s grief.

Grief for the work or the craft.

Grief for the version of ourselves that made things because something inside us moved, not because the platform needed feeding.

And I say this as someone who has spent years talking about audience. I believe in audience. I believe in data. I believe in understanding who the work is for. I believe in building a world around the work so one buyer, one executive, one festival, one room, does not hold the entire life of a project in its hands.

I believe all of that.

Probably too much sometimes.

Because Jennifer is right. There is a cost.

There is a cost to turning every artist into a broadcaster. Every filmmaker into a marketer. Every private thought into a public asset. Every wound into a hook. Every question into content. Every unfinished idea into proof that you still exist.

At some point, you stop asking, “What am I trying to make?”

And start asking, “What does this even become online?”

That is a terrible little death.

A quiet one, but a death.

A few days ago, I watched my first real documentary with my son.

American Bullfighter.

It was the film that broke me into the industry in a meaningful way. Not in some giant fantasy version of success. Not the private jet, champagne, “kid, you’re going places” version. But enough. Enough to open doors. Enough to let me make choices. Enough to make me believe that a film could still move through the world because it was strange, sincere, human, messy, and alive.

I made a fool of myself in that film.

I looked silly, stupid, vulnerable.

And watching it with my son, all these years later, I felt something I was not prepared for.

He was proud of me.

Not because the film was a business model

Not because it was franchise-able.

Not because it converted or scaled or demonstrated audience-market alignment across multiple verticals.

He was proud because he could see me making something with freedom.

That was the part that hurt.

Because I realized that might have been the last film I made where I felt that kind of creative freedom. The kind where the work was hard, but the people were pushing in the same direction. The kind where there was family in it. The kind where the goal was not to optimize the project into some dead-eyed market shape before it even had a pulse.

Back then, the art still mattered inside certain rooms.

But not always.

Let’s not romanticize the past too much. Hollywood was never a monastery. It was always a casino. But there were still places where talent was cultivated. Where new voices were brought in. Where a movie could just be a movie. Where a single film did not have to justify an entire corporate strategy.

Now everything has to become a business model before it is allowed to be a feeling.

A film is not just a film. It’s so much more:

It’s intellectual property, a brand extension, a content funnel, a platform play, a community strategy, a monetizable audience vertical.

Good God.

I say this a lot, “Sometimes I just want to make a chair”.

A simple chair.

Wood. Lines. Weight. Balance.

Something honest.

Something that does not need a greenlight. Something that does not require me to perform. Something that does not care if the algorithm approves of the grain. Something that just sits there, useful and quiet, because I made it with my hands.

I think a lot of us are looking for some version of that chair.

Something simple.

Something human.

Something that does not demand we become a product before we are allowed to make the thing.

And that is where Jennifer’s piece hit me hardest.

Because she is not wrong about the creator economy becoming the new gatekeeper.

That is the part we have to say out loud.

For years, the platforms sold artists a beautiful little story:

Come here.

Build here.

Post here.

Work here.

Give us your voice, your face, your rhythm, your jokes, your grief, your meals, your children, your process, your breakdowns, your tiny moments of accidental beauty.

Do that long enough, and maybe we will help you bypass the old gatekeepers.

And yes, a few people do.

A few become the poster children and get a deal.

But the rest?

The rest are told to keep posting.

Keep optimizing.

Keep dancing.

Keep confessing.

Keep bleeding in portrait mode.

The old gatekeepers wore suits.

The new ones wear blazers with hoodies.

Different politics for a minute, maybe. Different language. Softer branding. More talk about empowerment and community and access.

But give it time.

It will optimize.

It will condense.

It will consolidate.

It will become the same narrow road with better user experience.

And we will be told, once again, that if we are not making it through, the failure is ours.

Not enough willingness to flatten ourselves into something the machine can understand.

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I’m turning 60 in a few weeks.

That sentence feels insane to write.

And I don’t know how much I want to entertain the internet anymore.

I know the model. I teach the model. I believe parts of the model are necessary because I do not want filmmakers walking into a collapsing market empty-handed and calling that purity.

But I am also tired.

Not just from the decades in this fight..

Though that is in me.

I am tired from 25, almost 30 years inside this industry. Tired from watching the language change while the extraction stays the same. Tired from watching artists get told that survival requires one more pivot, one more platform, one more new set of rules handed down by people who rarely make anything except terms and conditions.

And then I went to Europe.

And I saw something that made the wound worse and better at the same time.

Public art.

Not as luxury.

Not as branding.

Not as a sponsored activation where everyone pretends the mural has a soul.

Actual public art.

Free buses taking people to cultural events. Theater that felt reachable. Art in the street. Artists visible in the life of the city. Work that existed because someone still believed culture was part of being alive together.

Not everything in Europe is some artistic paradise. Let’s not be stupid. The business gets ugly there too. Power is power everywhere.

But there was still a civic idea present that felt almost radical from an American distance:

Art is for us and not just for the market or the wealthy or the people with premium access.

For us.

For the public.

For the strange little human project of trying to understand who we are before we destroy each other or ourselves.

That is what breaks my heart about where we are now.

Because after enough time in Hollywood, you start to realize many of us were not working inside a temple of dreams.

We were working in the creative department of Chase Bank.

And maybe that sounds harsh.

But tell me it doesn’t feel true.

Tell me the last 20 years have not been one long migration away from art and toward financial engineering with cool fonts.

Tell me we have not watched the movie business become a risk-management business.

Tell me we have not watched the artist become the pitch, the pitch become the deck, the deck become the funnel, the funnel become the data, and the data become the thing everyone worships because nobody knows what else to believe in.

I don’t want to throw away audience.

I don’t want to throw away strategy.

I don’t want filmmakers to pretend that making the thing is enough when the market has become this brutal.

But Jennifer reminded me that if all we talk about is strategy, we lose the reason strategy mattered in the first place.

The point was never to become better servants of the machine.

The point was to keep the work alive.

The point was to protect the artist long enough for the artist to make something true.

The point was to help the film find its people without making the filmmaker disappear into performance.

So yes, build the audience.

Yes, understand the market.

Yes, know where the work belongs.

Yes, do not walk in empty.

But also remember this:

You are not content.

Your life is not inventory.

Your grief is not a growth strategy.

Your art does not become more valuable because a platform can measure it.

And if you still want to make something just because you hear the music, that is not naïve.

That may be the last honest thing left.

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Jennifer, your note wrecked me.

In the best way.

It reminded me that beneath all the strategy, all the market talk, all the decks and data and distribution plans, there is still a person standing there, trying to remember what it felt like to make something freely.

Not for permission.

Not for conversion.

Not for the algorithm.

Not for supper.

Just because the music started.

And for a moment, before the world got its hands on it, you wanted to dance.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, journalist, and founder of Shadowfile.Press . PitchCraft publishes from the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and the work of building things that matter.

There is a special kind of hell reserved for the documentary filmmaker with a real story and nowhere to put it.

Not a cute story. Not a clean little festival object. A real one.

War. Corruption. democracy cracking at the seams. Displacement. Climate. Extremism. Power doing what power does when no one is filming (or even when they are filming. Seems they don’t care either way.

You have access. You have footage. Maybe you have a subject who trusted you before anyone else cared. Maybe you crossed borders, emptied accounts, slept badly, and came back with something that actually matters.

Then you take it to the market.

And the market says:

Not now.

Too heavy.

Too political.

Too foreign.

Too hard to sell.

Too much like homework.

Too much like news.

Too much like something people “should” watch, which is often buyer code for something they do not believe people will choose to watch.

That is the problem.

Not that your film does not matter.

The problem is that “important” is no longer enough.

The Problem

Issue documentaries used to carry moral force into the room.

If the subject was urgent enough, that urgency had value. A broadcaster might need it. A streamer might want the awards heat. A festival might want the cultural weight. A foundation might want the impact.

That market is not gone.

But it is narrower. More cautious. More crowded. More allergic to risk.

Buyers are under pressure. Streamers are cutting back. Broadcasters are squeezed. Distributors are tired. Foundations are buried. Festivals are overwhelmed. Audiences are fragmented. And the world is on fire in so many directions that even catastrophe now has competition.

So a filmmaker walks in carrying a serious story and expects seriousness to be the currency.

But the room is asking different questions now.

Who is this for?

Who is already waiting for it?

What happens after someone watches it?

Why is this a film and not an article, podcast, panel, news segment, or nonprofit report?

Where is the audience?

Where is the event?

Where is the reason this story will not vanish 48 hours after release?

This is where a lot of issue-doc filmmakers get stuck.

They have the moral argument, the access, the footage.

They may even have a very good film.

But they have not built the world around the film.

And right now, the film alone is often being asked to do too much.

The Destination

The filmmaker does not just want to sell the documentary.

That is the surface desire.

What they really want is for the story to land.

They want the people in the film to feel their trust was not wasted. They want the work to reach beyond a festival screening, a few polite reviews, and a Q&A where everyone agrees the issue is “important” before drifting back to the bar.

They want consequence.

A room changed.

A conversation started.

A subject made harder to ignore.

A community seen clearly.

A powerful person made uncomfortable.

And yes, they want to get paid.

That should not be embarrassing.

The issue-doc filmmaker is too often expected to be artist, journalist, fundraiser, therapist, social worker, public servant, and unpaid moral witness with a camera bag.

No.

You need revenue.

You need a path.

You need the work to sustain itself so you can keep doing this without becoming a cautionary tale whispered over cheap wine at a documentary mixer.

That is the destination:

A film that matters, reaches people, creates consequence, and generates enough value that the filmmaker survives the act of making it.

The Spec Version

I’ve harped on this for a long time:

The old model was simple.

Make the film, submit to festivals, pray for a buyer, and hope the world notices

Sometimes that works. So does a slot machine.

The better move now is to create a spec version of the film’s larger life.

Not just a sizzle.

Not just a deck.

A working prototype of how this documentary moves through the world.

Before the buyer.

Before the distributor.

Before the laurels.

Before the savior executive with a Patagonia vest and twelve reasons to pass.

Can you show a small version of the film’s future?

That might be a 12-minute proof-of-concept screened for a targeted room.

It might be a live event with the subject, a moderator, and a partner organization.

It might be a university screening pilot.

It might be a short video series introducing the world of the film.

It might be a newsletter, field report, private salon, donor briefing, classroom module, podcast tour, community conversation, or paid test screening.

Not noise.

Not content slop.

A testable public life.

You are no longer saying, “Trust me bro, this story matters.”

You are saying, “Here is what happens when this story is placed in front of the right people.”

That is a different conversation.

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The Solution

Stop thinking only in terms of distribution.

Start thinking in terms of deployment.

Distribution asks:

Where can the film go?

Deployment asks:

What can the film do?

That is the shift.

A serious documentary needs architecture around it. Not because the art is weak. Because the market is weak. Because attention is fractured. Because the old civic infrastructure for serious work has been starved, sold, merged, gutted, or rebranded into something smooth and useless.

So you build your own smaller infrastructure.

Start here.

1. Find the Question

Do not start with topic.

Topic is too broad.

Ukraine is a topic. Climate is a topic. Democracy is a topic. Disinformation is a topic.

A question is sharper.

What does courage look like when institutions fail?

Who profits when truth becomes optional?

What happens to ordinary people when powerful men redraw maps?

How does a community survive when the story told about them is false?

That question is the engine.

It tells you who the film is for.

It tells you where it belongs.

It tells you what rooms it should enter.

2. Find the People Already Living Inside It

“Everyone should see this” may be morally true.

Strategically, it is useless.

Who already cares?

Professors. Students. Veterans. Diaspora communities. Legal advocates. Journalists. Faith groups. Human rights organizations. Public libraries. Museums. policy institutes. regional arts centers. Political podcasts. Specialty newsletters. Advocacy groups. Documentary clubs. Local theaters.

You are not looking for “the audience.”

You are looking for the first 500 people who already feel the wound your film is touching.

Find them.

Then build from there.

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3. Build Before the Film Is Finished

A documentary does not have to wait until completion to create value.

The research, footage, access, relationships, experience; it can all create value.

Build useful artifacts: a short scene, a dispatch, a screening guide, a reading list, a field note, a classroom sample, a partner deck, an interview series, a three-city test tour.

Not random posting.

Not “personal brand” theater.

Useful things that help the right people understand why this story matters now.

4. Design the Small Economy

This is where filmmakers get nervous because we have been trained to believe money corrupts seriousness.

It can.

But poverty does not purify the work either.

So ask the adult question:

How can this film create revenue without betraying itself?

Screening fees.

Educational licenses.

Speaking fees.

Foundation support.

Partner-hosted events.

Donor circles.

Institutional sales.

Community sponsorship.

Curriculum.

Consulting.

Workshops.

A limited theatrical event run.

A university tour.

These do not all belong to every film.

But some of them probably belong to yours.

The job is not to bolt a fake business onto the documentary.

The job is to understand the natural economy of the story.

5. Change What the Buyer Is Buying

If a buyer comes in, what are they acquiring?

Just a finished film?

Or a project with partners, audience, events, press angles, educational pathways, institutional interest, and a reason to exist now?

That matters.

A buyer may still say no.

Fine.

But you have changed the room.

You are not saying, “Please rescue this film.”

You are saying, “This film already has a life. Do you want to help scale it?”

That is a stronger position.

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Who This Is For

If you are a documentarian following this work, my guess is you are not chasing celebrity access or disposable content.

You are carrying something heavier.

You may have footage that matters. A cut. A sizzle. A subject. A relationship. A crisis. A question you cannot let go of.

You may be tired of being told to make it shorter, softer, less political, more personal, less complicated, more hopeful, more like something that already sold.

You may not need another inspirational speech.

You may need a better map.

So here is the map:

Find the question.

Find the people living inside it.

Build a small version of the film’s public life.

Create useful artifacts.

Test the rooms where the film belongs.

Design revenue paths that fit the subject.

Then pitch from movement, not desperation.

That does not guarantee a sale.

Nothing does.

But it gives the film more ways to live.

And in this market, that may be the difference between a serious story finding its people and becoming another beautiful corpse on a hard drive.

No one is coming to save the issue documentary.

Not the streamers.

Not the festivals.

Not the buyers hiding behind “we love it, but…”

The work has to walk in with a pulse.

It has to know where it belongs.

It has to know who it serves.

It has to know what it can do.

And then maybe the question changes.

Not:

Who is buying?

But:

Who needs this badly enough to help carry it?

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, journalist, and founder of Shadowfile.Press . Creative Force is streaming at Cannes International Film Week through May 31 at cannesfilmweek.com. PitchCraft publishes from the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and the work of building things that matter.

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Netflix says it is not buying Lionsgate.

That is the first thing worth saying plainly.

After Semafor floated Netflix as a possible suitor, Lionsgate shares jumped, the industry started whispering, and then Netflix denied it was interested. No filed offer. No signed deal. No official pursuit. Just the market doing what the market does when a 20,000-plus title library and franchises like John Wick and The Hunger Games suddenly look gettable.

So no, this may not be a Netflix story.

But it is absolutely a consolidation story.

Because even if Netflix is not the buyer, the logic behind the rumor does not go away. Lionsgate is exactly the kind of target a larger company would want right now: a recognizable library, active franchise intellectual property, a film and television engine, and a business the market can imagine folding into something bigger without the political nightmare that came with the Warner sweepstakes.

Given all this, it’s pretty likely someone will buy Lionsgate (or insert other large independent film production company here, think A24).

Probably not this week. Maybe not Netflix or even the obvious buyer. But a company like Lionsgate does not sit in the middle of a consolidating industry without becoming part of the math.

So the real question is: What happens to the film and television business when companies like Lionsgate keep getting treated as acquisition targets?

Because at this point, these mergers can’t be treated like isolated weather. It is a pattern. Scale chasing more scale. Libraries being treated like defensive fortresses. Audience attention fragmenting while capital tries to reassemble certainty by stacking more rights, more intellectual property, more old titles, and more control under fewer roofs.

And if you are trying to build a life as a filmmaker or producer with one foot in the system and one foot outside it, that pattern creates a real emotional and professional bind.

Because people still need to work.

That matters.

I am not interested in sneering at anyone who still pitches into the machine. Rent is real. Crews need jobs. Producers need buyers. Talent needs financing. Not everyone can simply declare independence, light a cigar, and “build outside the system” by Tuesday.

Most people are just trying to keep making work inside a system that keeps changing the rules.

That deserves some grace.

But it would also be dishonest to keep pretending the old pitch path is still a stable professional ladder when the ladder keeps getting bought, merged, debt-loaded, and stripped for parts.

The history here is not subtle: media companies keep using consolidation to chase leverage, libraries, and distribution muscle, then turn around and ask labor and creators to absorb the uncertainty (when their very jobs are uncertain, more on that later).

That is the bind now.

We still pitch to Hollywood because Hollywood still controls money, marketing, distribution, and the illusion of scale.

We also need to stop pretending Hollywood is healthy.

Those two things can be true at the same time.

If Netflix is not buying Lionsgate, the immediate story changes. The larger story does not.

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The larger story is that Lionsgate still looks like the kind of company that could be swallowed. A buyer gets deeper catalog, recognizable franchises, and more internal supply. Lionsgate gets an exit. Wall Street gets a narrative. The rest of the industry gets smaller.

That is the part worth paying attention to.

The important story would show up later: fewer meaningful buyers, more centralized bargaining power, more pressure on projects to arrive pre-legible, and even more reason for creators to show up with proof instead of vibes.

That is already where the business has been drifting.

More consolidation would not invent that logic.

It would intensify it.

And now there is another signal sitting right next to it.

Google is reportedly putting $75 million into A24 as part of an artificial intelligence research partnership.

That is not the same thing as buying a studio outright, but it points in the same general direction: the companies with the deepest pockets want to get closer to the places where culture, talent, intellectual property, and new production workflows are being made.

And A24 matters because it is one of the few modern studio brands that actually means something to audiences. People associate it with taste, risk, authorship, weirdness, credibility, and cultural heat. That is rare. So when one of the largest technology companies in the world wants a seat close to that machinery, we should pay attention.

On one side, Lionsgate looks buyable because of its library and franchises.

On the other, A24 attracts tech money because of its brand, taste, and proximity to the future of filmmaking tools.

Those are different stories, but they rhyme.

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Both suggest that the next version of Hollywood will not simply be studios competing with studios. It will be studios, streamers, technology companies, artificial intelligence companies, private equity, and distribution platforms all trying to own pieces of the same shrinking map.

And the danger is not just that the industry gets smaller.

It is that the idea of who is needed to make art gets smaller too.

Because artificial intelligence is almost always sold as empowerment: more tools, more speed, more possibility. Some of that may be true. But inside a business already obsessed with cutting costs and reducing risk, faster and cheaper often becomes fewer people in the room. Fewer editors. Fewer visual effects and concept artists. Fewer early-career people learning by being close to the work.

That does not mean every deal is bad or every new tool is evil.

But creators should pay attention.

Because when the money gets bigger, the rooms often get smaller. And creativity was never supposed to scale like software.

And this is where I think the moment asks for a little more clarity from all of us.

If the buyer universe keeps shrinking, then being “pitchable” in the old sense may not be enough anymore. Not worthless. Just insufficient.

If fewer companies control more libraries, more rights, and more audience access, then showing up with a screenplay and a prayer becomes a harder path than it used to be. The project may need to arrive with some signal attached to it: audience response, format clarity, proof-of-concept, creator traction, a clearer sense of why this thing lives now and not in a drawer for three years waiting for a more favorable quarter.

That is not because filmmakers lack talent.

It is because the market is asking for more evidence before it takes a risk.

The more concentrated the buying side becomes, the less room there is for beautiful ambiguity on the selling side.

That is not a moral judgment.

It is just the shape of the current market.

That may sound bleak, but I do not think it has to be.

I think it clarifies the job.

So here is the shift I would argue for.

We stop framing the problem as: Should I still pitch to Hollywood?

Instead, we frame it as: What kind of project can enter a market like this with enough strength, clarity, and leverage to survive the process?

That is a more useful question.

Because it accepts reality without surrendering to it.

It lets you say: yes, I may still need the machine. Yes, I may still need to sell into the machine. Yes, I may still need the scale, spend, and infrastructure that only a few large players can offer.

But I do not have to walk in empty.

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I do not have to build a project that, like the myth I always talk about, can only live if one overworked executive says yes at exactly the right moment.

I do not have to hand over all my leverage at the door and call that professionalism.

If the market keeps consolidating, then the practical response for filmmakers and producers is leverage.

Build work that has a path before the meeting and proof before the ask.

Build optionality, so “no” from a major buyer is a setback, not a death certificate.

That is not anti-Hollywood.

That is how you pitch to Hollywood now without letting Hollywood become your only oxygen source.

And maybe that is the harder truth underneath this latest Lionsgate rumor.

The issue is not whether Netflix buys Lionsgate, but rather that Lionsgate still looks buyable

The issue is that the buyer side keeps consolidating and that gate keeps getting narrower.

And for anyone still trying to make a life in this business, that can feel exhausting. You can do everything right. You can have the script, the deck, the relationships, the timing, the taste, the work ethic — and still feel like the room got smaller before you even walked into it.

That is the part we should be honest about.

But I do not think honesty has to lead to despair.

I think it can lead to a better kind of preparation.

Not the old preparation, where you polish the pitch and pray someone saves you.

A different preparation.

The kind where the project has some life in it before the meeting. The kind where there is proof, even if it is small. The kind where there is an audience signal, a piece of footage, a community, a reason this story needs to exist now.

No, that does not mean stop pitching.

It just means we should stop walking in like the world stayed still.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, journalist, and founder of Shadowfile.Press by The Shadow Gang, an AI-powered investigation engine for journalists, documentarians, podcasters, and researchers. Creative Force, my feature doc about the resistence in Ukraine, was most recently streamed at Cannes International Film Week through PitchCraft publishes at the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and building things that matter.

If you want to know what PitchCraft is really about, don’t start with the bio. Start with the bruises.

Start with the room.
The fake warmth.
The soft language.
The meeting that felt good and meant nothing.
The buyer nodding while already thinking about risk, timing, and how not to get fired.

That was the original engine here: helping filmmakers understand what’s actually happening when the system says one thing and does another.

But the room is no longer the whole story.

The path is thinner now. Buyers are slower. The old institutions are more frightened, less useful, and far less interested in real risk than they’d like to pretend. So PitchCraft had to widen.

It’s still about pitching. Still about leverage. Still about how projects move. But it’s also about audience, proof, timing, collapse, strategy, and what filmmakers can build when waiting stops being a plan.

So if you’re new here, start with these five.

They’re the clearest map of how filmmakers got here, what to do about it and the playbook for your next move.

1. Should You Stop Pitching to Hollywood?

This one is the practical wake-up call.

It’s about YouTube, Gen Z, proof, and the fact that a lot of filmmakers are still building as if the old pipeline is the center of the universe when it very obviously isn’t. I wrote it because too many people are still pitching like it’s 2012 while audience attention has already moved somewhere else.

The point is not that Hollywood is dead. The point is that if your entire strategy still assumes Hollywood is the only serious door, you may be standing in the wrong hallway. The article then delves into the five-step plan around platform-first thinking and proof-of-concept. Click here for the full article.

2. After An Insane 2025, Filmmaking Isn’t About Talent Anymore

This one gets at something I think a lot of filmmakers can feel but haven’t fully named yet.

Talent is no longer the thing separating people.

There are too many talented people. Too many smart people. Too many people with taste and pain and beautiful projects and no real understanding of the market their work is stepping into.

The divide now is literacy. Knowing how a thing moves. Where the money comes from. How the audience finds it. What leverage actually looks like now.

That one probably comes closest to the larger thesis running under a lot of this feed: less illusion, more literacy. Click here for the full article.

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3. Hollywood’s Crisis Wasn’t an Accident — It Was Engineered

This is the anger piece. Or maybe the accountability piece.

I got tired of hearing people talk about the state of the industry like it was weather. Like collapse just drifted in on the breeze. It didn’t. It was built. Choice by choice. Debt. Consolidation. Fear. Bad leadership. Spreadsheet thinking. Treating filmmakers like replaceable parts in a machine they didn’t even understand anymore.

That piece is me saying: enough with the passive voice. Name the thing. Name the decisions. Name the logic that got us here.

And then, more importantly, ask what that means for filmmakers now. Because buried inside that wreckage is a brief little window where creators may have more leverage than they’ve had in a long time. Click here for the full article.

4. I Stepped Away. Here’s What I’m Doing Instead of Waiting for Hollywood.

This is probably the most personal of the five, though I don’t think of it as a “personal essay.”

It’s the hinge.

It’s the piece where I stop pretending I can keep advising from the sidelines while not fully stepping into the arena myself under the new rules of the game.

That one came out of treatment, stillness, Ukraine, recovery, and the uncomfortable realization that while I believed in leverage, independence, and building outside the old gates, I hadn’t yet pushed myself far enough into modeling it.

If you want to understand why the publication itself started changing shape, this is a big part of the answer. Click here for the full article.

5. What Ted Hope Said At Cannes Without A Badge and What NonDe Should Pivot Towards Next

This one is probably the broadest statement of the worldview underneath everything else.

It starts with Ted Hope at Cannes without accreditation, but that’s really just the entry point. The bigger question is how we build anything genuinely new if we keep using the old system as the reference point for the new one.

That piece pulls together Ted, Cannes, CES, AI compliance, recovery language, NonDe, Ferran Adrià, El Bulli, and the basic truth that the system that got us here can’t be the system that gets us out.

That one matters to me because it’s about more than surviving the old model. It’s about whether we have the nerve to build something that doesn’t carry its DNA. Click here for the full article.

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So that’s probably the cleanest way I can say what PitchCraft is.

It’s still about the room.
Still about pitching.
Still about leverage.
Still about how projects move.

But it’s also about what happens after the fantasy burns off.

How filmmakers build proof.
How they understand audience without flattening the work.
How they stop waiting for systems that no longer know what to do with them.
How they make better moves with fewer illusions.

That’s the feed I want this to be.

Useful.
Sharp.
Actually relevant.
A place that helps filmmakers think a little straighter and move a little sooner.

If you’re new here, start with those five.

If one of them hits, subscribe.

And if you’ve been here a while, I’d genuinely love to know which one did the most work for you.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, journalist, and founder of Shadowfile.Press by The Shadow Gang, an AI-powered investigation engine for journalists, documentarians, podcasters, and researchers. Creative Force is streaming at Cannes International Film Week through May 31 at cannesfilmweek.com. PitchCraft publishes at the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and building things that matter.

A lot of filmmakers may still carry some version of this belief:

If the work is good enough, the right person will find it.

Not just anyone.

The right person.
Someone with taste.
Someone who “gets it.”
Someone who sees the work for what it is, sees the filmmaker for who they are, and wants to help carry it safely through the machinery.

That fantasy runs deep.

It isn’t really about exposure. Not at first.

It’s about something else. Permission.

It’s about the hope that somewhere out there is an executive, producer, financier, or gatekeeper with judgment, generosity, and actual power — someone who will recognize the work, recognize the artist inside it, and take enough personal interest to make sure the thing is handled with care.

Not just bought.
Not just optioned.
Protected.
Guided.
Treated with the seriousness it deserves.

That’s part of what makes the belief so hard to let go of.

Because it isn’t just a fantasy of being seen. It’s a fantasy of being chosen well.

And it makes emotional sense. There’s something deeply relieving in the idea that if the work is strong enough, then eventually someone with real taste and real influence will step in, hold the door open, and walk beside you through the process. Someone who won’t flatten the work, mishandle it, or make you feel like a problem to be solved.

The problem, of course, is that a lot of very good work still disappears.

A project can be excellent and still die quietly.
A script can be original, beautifully made, deeply felt, and still go nowhere.

Not because it wasn’t worthy.

But because the person many filmmakers are waiting for either never arrives, or arrives with a very different set of concerns.

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Because the people across the table are rarely showing up as caretakers of artistic destiny. More often, they are looking at timing, risk, audience behavior, market conditions, internal politics — all the things that help them protect themselves from being wrong.

That doesn’t make them evil.

It does mean they are often playing a different game.

And that gap matters.

Because one side may still be hoping for recognition and stewardship, while the other is listening for something more practical: proof, positioning, audience, risk reduction.

That can be a difficult shift to make peace with.

Because once that old fantasy starts to fall away, something tender gets exposed. The wish not just to be discovered, but to be guided. To be handled well. To have someone more established say, yes, this matters, and I’ll help make sure it survives what comes next.

There’s nothing strange about that wish. A lot of people in this business have lived inside some version of it.

But it may no longer be a workable model.

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Not because the work shouldn’t be protected.

But because waiting for that one ideal person to arrive can leave too much of the future of the project in hands that never actually appear.

At some point, it may be worth asking a different set of questions:

Who is this actually for?
Why would they care?
What part of the work lands hardest?
What am I building besides hope?

Those are not cynical questions.

They may simply be the questions that begin once a filmmaker stops waiting for perfect permission and starts building a path the work can actually move through.

And none of that requires flattening the work, chasing algorithms, or turning the film into something bloodless. It isn’t an argument against authorship. It’s an argument against leaving the fate of the work entirely in the hands of a fantasy.

I Want Industry Leverage

Because the system is busy.
The system is scared.
The system is often trying not to get fired.

The work may need a better plan than that.

And here is the hopeful part:

A better plan can actually be built.

This isn’t a eulogy for the old fantasy. It’s an invitation into something more solid. Because once the burden of waiting for the right person starts to lift, a filmmaker can begin doing concrete things.

They can make the work visible, legible, and easier for the right people to find, feel, and respond to. They can build leverage. They can create contact with reality before someone in a nicer office decides whether the thing deserves to live.

The older belief may have been comforting because it delayed the harder part.

But it also left the work with very little leverage.

A more useful belief might be this:

If the work is strong, it deserves more than hope.

It deserves a path.
It deserves contact with reality.
It deserves a real fighting chance.

That isn’t selling out.

It’s refusing to leave the future of the work entirely in the hands of permission.

And that should feel hopeful.

Because it means the work does not have to wait forever for the perfect champion to appear.

It means there are things that can be done now.

It means leverage can be built.

It means the work may have another life available to it.

And maybe the filmmaker does too.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, journalist, and founder of Shadowfile.Press by The Shadow Gang, an AI-powered investigation engine for journalists, documentarians, podcasters, and researchers. Creative Force is streaming at Cannes International Film Week through May 31 at cannesfilmweek.com. PitchCraft publishes at the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and building things that matter.

Every working filmmaker I know has the same problem.

Too many ideas. No momentum.

The pilot that’s been in draft three for eighteen months. The feature that needs one more pass. The limited series you’re “gathering research” for, which is a phrase that means nothing is happening.

None of it is moving. And you’ve quietly started to wonder if the problem is you.

It isn’t. The problem is your structure. You’re running a film business with the organizational habits of a grad student. One script. Obsessive revision. Waiting for perfection before you take it out. Then staring at your phone wondering why it never rings.

Let me tell you what actually works. Because I’ve sold tens of millions of dollars of content using this exact system, and I’ve watched independent filmmakers with real credibility use the same one to sell a body of work instead of dying on the hill of one dream project.

Here’s the part that matters.

This works whether you’ve cut ties with the industry completely. It works if you still have one foot in the business. It works if you’re about to give Hollywood one more honest, yet precarious crack. With an agent. Without an agent. The system does not care about your relationship status with the industry. It only cares whether things are moving.

And here is the whole thing.

Three projects. Three states. Three timelines. Always in motion.

Project One is in market. Right now. Being pitched, circulated, read. Not the thing you’re getting ready to sell. The thing that is out there today generating meetings, feedback, rejection, and occasionally the kind of traction that changes your year.

Project Two is in active development. You’re writing it. Revising it. Doing the real structural work. This is where the craft lives. But it has a deadline, a real one, because its only job is to become Project One the moment Project One closes or dies.

Project Three is in research and prep. Gathering material. Building the world. Thinking it through. This is your space to explore. But it’s bounded. Contained. Its only job is to become Project Two when Project Two moves up.

That’s it. That’s the system.

It is not a creative framework. It’s an operational one. And that distinction is everything, because most filmmakers treat development like a spiritual journey instead of a manufacturing process. You’re not waiting for inspiration. You’re running a pipeline.

Here’s what it looks like when the world starts throwing punches.

When Project One gets a pass, you don’t spiral. You send it to the next name on the list. When it gets real interest, you don’t abandon Two and Three to chase it. You keep building. Because interest evaporates. Because deals take months, years to close. Because momentum dies the second you stop.

When Project Two hits a structural wall, you don’t stop. You work on the problem. If you need air, you shift to Project Three. But you never stop. Stopping is how eighteen months vanishes into draft three of something that never ships.

When Project Three starts feeling urgent, begging to jump the line, you finish Project Two first. You honor the sequence. The sequence is the only thing standing between you and six half-finished scripts and nothing in market.

The system works because it kills the two things that kill filmmakers.

Perfectionism dies because Project One has to ship. Not when it’s perfect. When it’s ready. And ready means strong enough to start a real conversation. The rest happens in the room.

Panic dies because you’re never betting your whole life on one script. Project One gets rejected, Project Two is already moving. Project Two hits a wall, Project Three is already building. You stop being precious and start being productive.

This is how you build a development practice that doesn’t depend on a studio, a streamer, or anyone else deciding you’re allowed to work.

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Three projects. One generating opportunities. One being built. One being researched.

That is the minimum viable slate for a working filmmaker. Not six ideas in various states of neglect. Not one perfect script that never leaves your laptop.

The hard part was never the work. It’s accepting that the work doesn’t stop. That shipping beats polishing. That momentum beats perfection every single time.

Most filmmakers never build this system because they’re waiting for permission to take themselves seriously.

Stop waiting.

Start building.

You already know what your three projects are.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, journalist, and co-founder of shadowfile.press. PitchCraft publishes from the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and the work of building things that matter.

PitchCraft started with a specific promise.

I would tell you how the pitch room actually works. What the buyer is really thinking. Why the comp titles matter more than your concept. Why the Friday night “Pass” email gets written before the meeting ends.

That promise brought many of you here.

It still stands.

But if I kept writing as though all we needed was a sharper deck and a cleaner pitch, I’d be lying to you.

Because this is no longer just about pitch craft.

It’s about what the times now demand from filmmakers.

We are not dealing with an industry that is merely difficult, unfair, or slow. We are dealing with one hollowed out by cowardice, extraction, political servility, and executives who confuse caution with wisdom.

And what’s coming is worse.

Across film, television, media, and tech, institutions are bending toward authoritarian gravity in real time. The people who should be defending culture, truth, and public imagination are protecting access, quarterly stability, and their place at the table instead.

There is not a major studio or streamer untouched by that rot.

That matters more than people realize.

Because a country without a serious cinema culture loses one of the last real ways it has of examining itself. It loses memory. It loses moral imagination. It loses the ability to recognize what it has become.

A nation without an examined screen culture becomes a nation living an unexamined life.

And we already know where that leads:

More spectacle.
More propaganda.
More numbness.
More myth dressed up as patriotism.

So yes, we still need to hold the industry accountable.

But more than that, we need to wrestle the future of filmmaking away from the people who have proven they cannot be trusted with it.

That is the shift.

Why This Became Urgent For Me

Part of my own clarity came from finally stopping long enough to take stock.

I never really had. I was too busy surviving, building, improvising, and dragging the piano uphill. Twenty-five years goes by fast when you’re too stubborn to stop and too dumb to quit.

But when I finally stopped, I realized I had spent decades building a strange set of skills, often by accident.

I’ve always been doing three things:

Making films.
Building technology platforms.
Doing investigative journalism without always calling it that.

And somewhere along the way, I got good at all three.

I never went to film school. I never inherited the more polite version of how this business was supposed to work. I just made what I needed, when I needed it, without asking permission.

Now I understand those skills were never unrelated.

Now I need to put them to greater use.

The Journalism Piece Is Not a Side Quest

My proximity to journalism is not a recent political mood swing.

It became real because the work demanded it.

Desert Bayou, a film about 700 African-American Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina who were airlifted without their knowledge to a military base in the middle of the Utah Desert without their permission. The film changed the way FEMA operated until it too was gutted. That happened because I followed the facts where they led and held truth to power whether the powerful liked it or not.

Later, in Ukraine, journalism became something even more immediate: safety. It taught my team and me how to move through a war zone where bad information could get you killed as fast as incoming fire.

That changes a person.

It changed me.

And it clarified something I can no longer ignore:

The political and global-affairs documentary space in America has been intentionally cratered.

Not neglected.
Cratered.

Because power found it inconvenient.

Because serious documentaries—the kind that follow the money, expose wrongdoing, and ask the follow-up question—make powerful people uncomfortable. So that space was thinned out and left for dead while everyone pretended the market had moved on.

The market didn’t move on.

Power cleared the room.

That is one reason I’m shooting the pilot for a show I’m producing called Fixing The News. Its purpose is simple: hold corporate news accountable for refusing to do its job—for failing to ask the follow-up question even when they have the receipts.

We have the receipts.
They have the clips.
Still no follow-up question.

That’s not journalism.

That’s theater for advertisers.

And yes, that informs what I’m doing here too.

Because if filmmakers don’t understand the larger information war swallowing the culture, we’re going to keep making beautiful objects in the middle of a house fire and calling that a strategy.

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Why PitchCraft Has To Change

PitchCraft is still for filmmakers. Exclusively. FULL STOP.

If you are a screenwriter, director, producer, documentarian, showrunner, editor—or anyone whose future depends on getting films or series financed, made, distributed, and seen—this is most definitely your publication.

That part is not changing.

What is changing is the job of the publication.

For two years, I wrote about the pitch room. The office. The conference table pitches. The Zoom pitches. I broke down the comp titles, the fake authority, the buyer psychology, the second-mortgage Norwegian water, the Kubrick coffee table books.

That work still matters.

Pitch intelligence is still foundational.

But pitch intelligence alone is no longer enough. Not when the rooms are emptying out. Not when buyers are disappearing. Not when the market is freezing up and pretending caution is wisdom.

You cannot pitch your way through a market that is no longer built to recognize you.

So PitchCraft has to expand to meet the moment.

Not into generic consulting.
Not into motivational porridge.
Not into creator-economy mush.

Into the next set of tools filmmakers actually need.

How to build audience before the meeting.
How to use audience intelligence the way studios already do.
How to generate proof instead of promises.
How to structure projects so they can earn before the edit is locked.
How to find financing outside the usual choke points.
How to think like an operator, not just an applicant.

That is the new PitchCraft.

Same reader.
Same voice.
Bigger stakes.
Wider toolkit.

Why I’m Qualified To Make This Shift

Because I have seen more than one big industry-wide transition before.

Long before streaming became wallpaper, I was one of the people building the technologies and systems that helped shape the early video streaming and the multi-platform era (for better or for worse). My company built distribution pathways that didn’t exist yet and created content for them.

That matters now.

Because I know what it looks like when new tools arrive before institutions know what to do with them. I know what it looks like when the ground moves and the people in power keep pretending the floor is stable.

I’ve seen the shift before.

I see this one now.

And I’m telling you plainly: filmmakers who wait for permission from the old structure are going to get buried by the next one.

What I’m Also Going To Be More Honest About

I’m done pretending that my own work lives in a separate box from what I write here.

It doesn’t.

I am a platform for filmmakers, a company designed to put audience intelligence directly into independent producers hands before the pitch, before the greenlight, before the middleman takes his cut.

• I’m producing Fixing The News.

• I’m building Shadowfile.

• I’m preparing Creative Force for distribution outside the broken American system.

• I’m directing another feature doc this July and I’m getting ready to close a first look deal in Canada.

All of that informs what I think, what I test, and what I write.

As I have been, when it serves you, I’m going to share what I’m learning from building those things: what works, what fails, what the numbers say, what the field conditions actually are. Only this time, more frequently, with more actionable detail and always with your filmmaking career at the center of it.

Not as memoir.
Not as founder cosplay.
As field reports.

Because if I’m out there testing the tools for the world that’s coming and I keep that hidden from the filmmakers I claim to serve, then this publication is just another performance.

I’m not interested in performance anymore.

I’m interested in utility.
Truth.
Leverage.

What You Can Expect Going Forward

Here is the publication.

Two posts a month on how the system works now.
Operational. Specific. Tactical. Buyer psychology. Pitch intelligence. Market decoding.

One post a month on what is being built outside the system.
Audience intelligence. Revenue architecture. New pathways. Distribution experiments. Financing alternatives. Real numbers when I have them.

One post a month, at most, on the harder cultural questions.
What this industry is becoming. What this country is losing. What filmmakers owe one another when the institutions no longer deserve our trust.

That is PitchCraft now.

Not because I’m drifting.

Because I’m aiming.

So Here’s the Ask

If this is the work you want, stay.

Read closely. Share it. Send it to the filmmaker who still thinks a better deck is the whole answer.

Because this next chapter is not about getting a little better at surviving inside a failing system.

It is about taking back the tools of story, audience, distribution, and truth before they are fully absorbed into the same machinery that has already flattened so much else.

If that sounds ambitious, good.

The stakes are ambitious.

If this is not the publication you signed up for, you should leave with no hard feelings. I’d rather lose a subscriber than keep disappointing one.

But I suspect many of you have been waiting for someone to say this plainly:

This is no longer just about making it in the industry.

It is about whether filmmakers are willing to build the next version of screen culture before the current custodians finish gutting it.

That is the work now.

I’m in.

I hope you are too.

Let’s get to it.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, journalist, and founder of Shadowfile.Press . Creative Force is streaming at Cannes International Film Week through May 31 at cannesfilmweek.com. PitchCraft publishes from the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and the work of building things that matter.

Ted Hope just wrote something that stopped me mid-coffee.

Not because it was surprising. Because it was true in the specific, earned, costly way that only people who have actually been inside the machine can write true things.

He talked about being at Cannes without accreditation. About having 23 films in official selection and still getting dropped in the protocol rankings the moment he stopped being useful to the people doing the ranking. About doing meetings not to transact but just to connect. About wondering, after thirty-five years, whether any of it matters.

I read it twice.

Then a third time.

Because what Ted is describing — with the grace and self-awareness of someone who has genuinely loved this thing his whole life — is what it feels like when the system you helped build decides it’s done with you. Not dramatically. Not with a speech. Certainly no cake at an office party. Just quietly, efficiently, the way systems dispose of people who no longer serve their primary function or who bucked their silly system.

Which is not making great films btw.

It never was.

I started this year at CES in Las Vegas and came home with a very clear picture of exactly what that primary function is.

If you want to understand where Hollywood’s head actually is — not where it says it is in the trades, not the panel discussions about the future of storytelling, but where it actually is — spend forty-eight hours watching studio executives try to talk about AI.

It was the most expensive display of compliance I have ever witnessed.

Room after room of people with VP after their names who have spent their careers learning to say yes to the right things at the right time, now learning to say yes to a new set of right things. The language was different. The posture was identical. Acquiescence dressed as innovation. Compliance wearing a lanyard that said FUTURE OF CONTENT (and again, with that fucking quilted Patagonia vest and white sole dress shoes.).

I sat in a session where a Warner executive explained, with genuine enthusiasm, how they were going to undertake a 3-year experiment in one of their smaller ad teams. AI was going to transform how they advertised to people. They came right out and said it, “Our priority as a movie studio is advertising”. Not that you don’t need to get the word out, but you make fucking movies you wankers.

But sure. AI will fix that.

The same week I got back from Vegas I was doing some recovery work — the kind you do when you finally admit that the pace and the weight of building things inside a broken system has extracted more than it was supposed to. And a member of the clinical team said something that reframed everything I had just watched at CES in four seconds flat.

The system that got you here, into this current situation, can’t be the system that gets you well.

That’s the whole argument. Right there.

Not just for personal recovery. For the film industry. For every movement that has tried to fix Hollywood and found itself, eighteen months later, having become a slightly more articulate, more considerate version of the thing it set out to replace.

United Artists. The Directors Company. The digital distribution revolution. The audience-first financing wave. When influencers got too much juice, the industry made MCNs to corral them in one place and take their share along the way. Every iteration of the same idea — creators taking ownership, bypassing the gatekeepers, building something new — eventually hit the same wall. Not because the people were wrong. Because they kept using the old system’s as a kind of reference point for the new.

Ted knows this and is the reason NonDe exists. He’s been hitting that wall longer than most people have been in the industry. And the cracks are real. What isn’t clear yet is whether the wall comes down or the people cracking it do.

Which brings me back to Ted and NonDe and the question underneath all of this.

Ted’s answer— build outside, build new, stop asking permission from the institution that was never designed to give it — is right. Absolutely, completely right. The clinical team was right too. You cannot use the broken system to fix the broken system and I’m not sure Ted is even saying that, it’s just human nature. The thing one is most familiar with becomes the point of departure for new ideas.

And this is where things het thorny. Building outside requires money. Serious money. Lots and lots of it. It just does. They have tons of it and we don’t. It’s all they think about. Its how they attempt to make problem children like Ted Hope go away.

It can’r be crowdfunding money. Not community goodwill money. Capital. The kind that has expectations attached to it and lawyers and governance structures and the slow grinding machinery of institutional decision-making. The moment that machinery arrives, the movement is at risk of becoming what it replaced. A selection committee is still a selection committee regardless of whose values inform it. A gatekeeper with better politics is still a gatekeeper.

So the model has to be different from the ground up.

Not reformed. Different. Completely. No old institutional DNA to defend. Build the new, nowhere near the fetid carcass of the old.

Spanish fenom chef, Ferran Adrià didn’t just raid the best kitchens in the world and try to deprogram their best chefs. He did something that made far less sense on paper and far more sense in practice. He built a think tank. Staffed it with architects and welders and airline pilots and postal workers. Gave them the language and tools of food, a budget, a kitchen, and a mandate that basically amounted to: try it, see what happens, we’ll pay for you to find out. No institutional habits to unlearn. No sacred techniques to protect. No internal voice whispering that this isn’t how it’s done because nobody in the room had ever been told how it’s done.

That’s how you build the best restaurant in the world.

Not by reforming the people the old system already made.

By finding the people it never bothered to notice. That’s most of us in NonDe.

That is the model NonDe may need. Not a reformation of what exists. A reinvention built by people the old system never saw coming.

And yes — El Bulli closed when its founder lost his mojo. Maybe that’s the cautionary tale. Maybe it was never supposed to survive that. Maybe some things are meant to burn bright and end on their own terms by rebelling against the “Man” the whole way.

NonDe gets to choose which kind of thing it is.

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In closing this thought, I turn sixty in July.

I’ll be honest with you the way Ted was honest with us. I have spent real time this year asking whether I keep doing this. Whether the wall is worth hitting. Whether there is a version of my life that involves designing minimalist furniture — and I say that with complete sincerity because I think about it constantly and have absolutely no idea where that impulse came from. Maybe it’s the part of me that wants to build something that doesn’t require a greenlight. Something you can touch. Something without a development process or a Friday night email from an assistant.

But there’s a scene in The Bourne Identity that won’t leave me alone.

Bourne has shot the assassin. They both know how it ends. And just before the he dies the assassin looks up and says:

Look what they make us give.

That’s the real cost. Not the projects that didn’t get made. Not the deals that fell apart. Not the markets where the buyers couldn’t get away fast enough. The cost is what you surrender of yourself to a system that was never going to give it back. The years. The energy. The furniture you never designed.

There’s a speech in Moneyball (this is third time I’ve mentioned this quote on Substack, because it’s so appropriate for this movement — First, I shared it with a subscriber who was going through some stuff, then when the regime said she was homeless and now to our over caffinate and and road-weary friend, Ted.

Anyway, the Red Sox owner talking to Billy Beane — about how the first person through the wall always gets bloody. That it’s a certainty. That the pioneers are the ones the system makes an example of before it quietly adopts everything they built.

Ted Hope is bloody.

So am I. So are most of you, I imagine.

That is the model NonDe may need. Not a reformation of what exists. A reinvention built by people the old system never thought to invite in the first place. But here’s what the Bourne scene and the Moneyball speech are both actually about, underneath the blood and the certainty of loss.

They’re about people who knew the cost and went anyway.

That’s not tragedy.

That’s the only way walls come down.

The system that got us here can’t be the system that gets us out. Ted said it without saying it. The clinical team said it plainly. El Bulli proved it with food.

Now it’s our turn to prove it with film.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, journalist, and founder of Shadowfile.Press . Creative Force is streaming at Cannes International Film Week through May 31 at cannesfilmweek.com. PitchCraft publishes from the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and the work of building things that matter.

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The Ukrainians who made this film with me are still living this war every single day. Help us keep this historic fight for democracy and dignity in the forefront. Help them see that the America still cares even if our politicians don’t.

Here’s how:

Step 1 — Go to Creative Force is streaming at Cannes is now live. Here’s exactly how to watch — and why it matters.

The Ukrainians who made this film with me are still living this war every single day. Help us keep this historic fight for democracy and dignity in the forefront. Help them see that the America still cares even if our politicians don’t.

Here’s how:

Step 1 — Go to https://www.whush.com/videos/creative-force-final-festival-1080p and create a free account. Two minutes. Credit card required but you will not be charged. A $1 hold appears and reverses within 24 hours. **So sorry for this, but this is how the festival set it up. You can watch it by staying on Whush which is a a bit better viewing experience.

Step 2 — You can go to

https://www.cannesfilmweek.com/

and find Creative Force in the documentary features section. Hit watch if you want to watch it on the festival site.

Step 3 — You have 14 free days. Cancel anytime if you don’t want to continue. Set a reminder now.

Step 4 — Share this note. Every view counts toward the Audience Choice Award. Should we win it, every dollar goes to the https://pylyporlykfoundation.org/en/yellow-bus-2025-together-nine-days-of-learning-inspiration-and-unity/ — creative education and emotional support for Ukrainian children living inside the war.

Streaming May 12-31. Free. Every device.

The resistance was always going to be documented.

We were there.and create a free account. Two minutes. Credit card required but you will not be charged. A $1 hold appears and reverses within 24 hours. **So sorry for this, but this is how the festival set it up.

Step 2 — Go to

https://www.cannesfilmweek.com/

and find Creative Force in the documentary features section. Hit watch.

Step 3 — You have 14 free days. Cancel anytime if you don’t want to continue. Set a reminder now.

Step 4 — Share this note. Every view counts toward the Audience Choice Award. Should we win it, every dollar goes to the https://pylyporlykfoundation.org/en/yellow-bus-2025-together-nine-days-of-learning-inspiration-and-unity/ — creative education and emotional support for Ukrainian children living inside the war.

Streaming May 12-31. Free. Every device.

The resistance was always going to be documented.

We were there.

BREAKING: Screenings begin May 12 — five days from now. Through May 31.

You can see the full official selection right here: cannesfilmweek.com/documentary-feature-films

The direct screening link hasn’t come through yet. Look — Hey, running an international film festival right now is not a simple operation and I get that. But communication isn’t exactly their strong suit at the moment. The second that link lands in my inbox I’m dropping it here. Watch this space.

Here is why the next few weeks matter beyond the film itself.

The festival awards a $500 cash prize to the film with the most views by May 31. Should we win it, every single dollar goes directly to the Pylyp Orlyk Foundation — which provides creative education and emotional support for children in Ukraine living inside the war.

So if you watch it and share it, you’re not just supporting the film.

You’re supporting the people the film was made for.

And while you’re on that official selection page — the company we’re in on this slate makes me proud to be a documentary filmmaker.

Nothing to See Here: Watts handed iPhones to twenty residents — rival gang members, police officers, parents — and gave them full control of their own story. No outside voice. No script. Then put them all in a room together to watch each other’s footage. What happened next is something no Hollywood film could manufacture.

Sila tells the story of Inuit women and three hundred years of Danish colonialism — including a systematic medical program that inserted contraceptive devices into girls as young as thirteen without consent or warning. Luminous. Devastating. Necessary.

Where Is Love? put Syrian refugee children on stage in Jordan performing Oliver! in Arabic. Sir Cameron Mackintosh backed it. It will wreck you in the best possible way.

These films deserve your time. Every one of them.

But start with Creative Force.

Because the children it was made for are still waiting.

Official selection page: cannesfilmweek.com/documentary-feature-films

Screening link dropping here the minute I have it. Share this post in the meantime. It matters more than you know.

Before anything else, I am a documentary filmmaker.

Not a strategist. Not a technologist. Not a newsletter author, though I’ve become one. A documentary filmmaker first. That’s the DNA. That’s where this all started and where it still lives. The journalism came second. The development work came third. Everything else — the platforms, the tools, the company building — grew out of one foundational belief. That the most important thing a camera can do is point at something true and refuse to look away.

I’m thinking about that now as my doc, Creative Force, heads to Cannes. And getting a film to that moment — any film, after any journey — forces a kind of reckoning. You stop moving long enough to ask what you actually made. Who it’s for. What you owe the people who trusted you with their story when everything around them was on fire.

That reckoning, for me, lands somewhere between gratitude and fury.

Because, while I am grateful for the experience, I’m heartbroken by what this industry has done to documentary storytelling.

Not angry. Heartbroken. There’s a difference.

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I got off a call with my agent yesterday.

He’d been at Hot Docs. Sitting across from buyers. Showing them work.

When he got to my Ukraine documentary — a film about the civilian resistance, about ordinary people making extraordinary decisions in the first hours of an invasion — the buyers couldn’t get away from it fast enough.

Not because the film was bad. He didn’t get that far.

Because of the subject matter.

Ukraine? Pass!

Let me put that in context.

We are living through a global moment of resistance that has no modern precedent.

In Ukraine, ordinary people are in years into defying an empire with their bare hands and an unbreakable insistence on existing. In this country, something stranger and more significant is happening — Prtions of both the left and the right, people who agree on almost nothing, are finding themselves on the same side of the same street, pushing back against greed, corruption, and the organized machinery of human suffering. Across Europe, across Latin America, across every continent where people are being squeezed by the same concentrated power wearing different flags — the word of this moment, the word that cuts across every border and ideology and demographic, is RESISTANCE.

That is the story the world is living right now.

And the acquisition executives cringed at the idea of a documentary about the war in Ukraine.

I want to be careful here. This isn’t about my film. One documentary is not the point.

And this isn’t about the people making all those sports docs, true crime series, or music films. Those filmmakers are doing serious work. Many of them are doing extraordinary work. The problem is not what they’re making.

The problem is what’s being purposefully erased to make room for it.

The Ukrainian resistance is one of the defining stories of this century. Not this decade. This century. Three generations from now, filmmakers will still be making work about what happened when a people decided, collectively and without ceremony, that they were not going to hand their country over. That story will be told in every language. It will shape how the world understands courage, resistance, and the relationship between ordinary people and empire for as long as people tell stories.

That war is still raging. The human cost is still accumulating. The inspiration being generated by the people fighting it is still epic, still newsworthy, still the kind of thing that documentary film exists to capture and hold for the historical record.

And buyers are treating it like a trend that already peaked.

The acquisition executives who turned away from it didn’t protect their slates.

They opted out of history.

And I keep asking myself what kind of philosophy produces that decision. What business school teaches that a content model which does — at minimum — the smallest amount of work toward social good, toward cultural record, toward the basic function of bearing witness, is simply not worth the bandwidth. That the ROI on truth is too uncertain. That the risk of mattering is too high.

That’s not being the custodian of your slate. That’s moral bankruptcy dressed in a Patagonia vest and calling itself strategy.

Here is what makes that decision almost cosmically absurd.

While American buyers were passing, ARTE — the Franco-German public broadcaster — invested over €1.5 million funding twelve Ukrainian documentaries through their Generation Ukraine initiative. Two of those films premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024. One of them, Intercepted, directed by Oksana Karpovych, won special mentions for both the Ecumenical Award and the Amnesty International Award.

ARTE is still producing Ukraine war documentaries now, in 2026.

The head of ARTE Distribution said it plainly this year: the demand for documentaries remains strong globally. High-end docs with strong editorial vision and international relevance are exactly what audiences want.

Europe didn’t decide this topic had run its course.

America did. On behalf of everyone. Without asking.

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There is no empirical evidence that American audiences have stopped wanting documentary films about things that matter.

None. The data does not exist.

What exists is a curated content slate that has decided, on behalf of all of us, that documentary means four things now.

Sports. True crime. Music. Celebrity.

Highly polished. Highly produced. But often with a relationship to truth that is — let’s be generous — selective.

Not because audiences rejected it. Because executives and commissioners decided audiences wouldn’t want it — before those audiences were ever given the chance to decide for themselves.

That distinction is everything.

At the exact moment when a global resistance movement is looking for its mirror — for the stories that reflect back what it’s fighting for and why — the American documentary industry has decided that the most important thing it can do is commission another limited series about a fraudulent influencer.

The death of Participant Media marked the end of the last major institutional infrastructure in America built around the idea that documentary should go where corporate news will not. That it should sit with the uncomfortable and say: this matters, and you need to see it.

Participant made An Inconvenient Truth. Citizenfour. American Factory. Films that changed policy, shifted culture, and found massive audiences who were hungry for exactly what they were being told didn’t exist.

That infrastructure is gone. The gap has been papered over.

Meanwhile corporate news — the other institution that was supposed to hold truth to power — completed its own collapse. Documentary was supposed to be the backstop.

That function has been deliberately, systematically abandoned.

The erasure of historic documentation from the content slate is not a market correction. It is a choice. Made by a small number of people. With enormous consequences for the historical record.

And history — the actual, accumulating, unstoppable history being made right now in the streets of Kyiv and Washington, Tehran, Brussels and Beijing — does not wait for a buyer to decide it’s commercially viable.

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So what comes next.

Here’s the part most people in this industry haven’t fully processed yet.

The buyers don’t control distribution anymore. They control one distribution path. And it’s contracting.

The infrastructure that actually reaches global audiences — YouTube, Substack, direct email, international public broadcasters, community-based screening networks, parametric licensing — none of it requires an acquisition executive’s approval. None of it requires a pitch meeting. None of it requires someone in a market to decide your subject matter has run its course.

Here’s the mind-bending part.

The audience for serious documentary work is not smaller than it used to be. It is larger, more dispersed maybe, but more reachable, and more willing to pay directly than at any point in the history of the form. What collapsed was not demand. What collapsed was the intermediary layer that used to be required to connect supply to demand.

That layer is now optional.

Which means the question is no longer: how do I get a buyer to say yes.

The question is: what does filmmaker-direct distribution look like for serious documentary work in 2026.

That question has answers that didn’t exist five years ago.

International co-production money — Europe is actively buying what America is ignoring. ARTE proved it with twelve films and €1.5 million. ZDF, the Nordic public broadcasters, and the BBC all still believe documentary has a civic function and fund it accordingly. The submission portals are open. The appetite is real. The money is there.

Audience-first development — building the community around the film before the film is finished. Not marketing. Infrastructure. The audience that will demand the film exists before the film is acquired.

Parametric licensing — releasing work in layers. A chapter. A scene. A conversation. Each one building the audience and generating revenue before the full work exists. The film funds itself through its own distribution.

Direct international screening networks — community organizations, universities, cultural institutions, diaspora communities. They have budgets. They have audiences. They don’t need a platform’s permission.

None of this is romantic. None of it is easy.

But all of it exists. Right now. Available to any filmmaker willing to stop organizing their career around the approval of people who opted out of the most important stories of our time — at the exact moment the world needed someone to tell it.

The global resistance doesn’t need Hollywood’s permission to exist.

It’s already building its own infrastructure.

The question is whether documentary filmmakers are going to be part of it.

Or whether we’re going to keep waiting for a buyer who’s too busy passing on Ukraine to notice the world is on fire.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, journalist, and founder of Open Studio OS. Creative Force screens at Cannes International Film Week, May 11-31. PitchCraft publishes from the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and the work of building things that matter.

They sit across from you with a spreadsheet.

You just don’t get to see it.

That spreadsheet — or some version of it — is why certain projects get greenlit and yours didn’t. Not because your idea was worse. Because they had data you didn’t. Audience intelligence. Viewership patterns. Platform behavior. Cultural affinity mapping. The metrics that tell a buyer not just who watches what — but why, when, how often, and what they’ll actually pay for.

You were pitching on instinct.

They were deciding on data.

That asymmetry is the whole game. And it has been, deliberately, for a very long time.

Meet the KPIx Model

— one of the sharpest media strategists working today — built a framework thatI live by. This framework maps the modern audience in ways the industry pretends only it can access. Here’s what it actually measures:

Audience Identity — Who are they. Not demographics. Identity. What they believe. What they value. What they watch when nobody’s looking.

Platform Behavior — Where they consume. How they move between platforms. What they finish versus what they abandon.

Content Affinity — What genres, tones, and themes create loyalty versus casual viewing. The difference between an audience that watches and an audience that evangelizes.

Cultural Velocity — How fast is this conversation moving. Is the subject matter gaining cultural momentum or losing it. Is now the right time or did you miss the window.

Willingness to Pay — Not just whether they’ll watch. Whether they’ll subscribe, buy, share, or show up in person for something. The metric that turns viewers into revenue.

Competitive Positioning — Where does your project live in the current content landscape. What’s it competing with. What’s the white space.

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This is what the buyer knows when you walk in.

This is what you’ve never had access to.

Until now.

What a Filmmaker Does With This

Everything changes when you own this data first.

You stop pitching concepts and start presenting evidence. You don’t walk in saying I think this audience exists. You walk in showing exactly where they live, what they’re already watching, how large the addressable audience is, and what comparable content has returned in revenue.

That’s not a pitch anymore.

That’s a business proposal.

The buyer’s primary job — the thing behind every nod and every comp title and every Friday email — is risk mitigation. Their entire apparatus exists to reduce the chance they’re wrong. When you walk in having already done that work, you’ve taken their most powerful tool and put it in your hands.

You’ve removed their ability to say we just don’t know if the audience is there.

Because you do know.

And you can prove it.

The Insurance Problem

Think about the insurance industry for a moment.

It is, structurally, a middleman. It inserts itself between you and an outcome, collects a significant toll on the way through, and delivers results that are — at best — debatable. You pay every month for a service you hope you never need, priced by people whose financial interest is in paying out as little as possible.

Hollywood’s studio and network system is identical architecture.

It sits between the filmmaker and the audience. It extracts the margin. It owns the data. It controls the timing. It decides what gets made, when it gets seen, and who profits from it.

And then it calls that arrangement a career.

The insurance industry makes sense — if you’re the insurance company.

The studio system makes sense — if you’re the studio.

Neither one was designed with you in mind.

What’s Coming

I’m going to be careful here because this is still cake batter.

But I’ll say this much.

What we’ve been building — quietly, with people who are as good at this as anyone I’ve met — is a system that puts audience intelligence in the filmmaker’s hands before the pitch. Before the greenlight. Before any buyer gets to pretend they knew it would work all along.

And the part that matters most:

Before the edit is locked.

Not after the sale. Not after distribution. Not after the system has taken its toll and handed you whatever’s left.

During development. When the data can still shape the project. When the audience relationship can be built in real time. When the revenue can start moving before anyone in a decorated room has said yes or no.

The middleman doesn’t disappear.

He just becomes optional.

We’re not ready to show it yet.

When we are, you’ll know.

And if you’re a filmmaker who has spent years being on the wrong side of that spreadsheet —

it’s going to feel like coming home.

Stay close. There’s more coming.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, journalist, founder of The Shadow Gang, his media since 2009 . PitchCraft publishes from the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and the work of building things that matter. Subscribe if this post resonated with you.

We’ve done the work.

We know our story. We’ve lived with it long enough that it wakes us up at 3am with a better version of act two.

We are ready.

And then we walk into the room.

There are three versions of this room.

Each one is its own special kind of theater.

The Office

Just us and them.

Three modes:

The Collected Intellectual — Criterion Blu-rays arranged by director. Books about Kubrick that have never been opened. A vintage film camera that that also has never never been used. This person wants us to know they have taste. They will pass on our project and feel cultured doing it.

The Approachable Creative — A neon sign. A fidget toy that costs two hundred dollars. A plant that is definitely fake, although a really good facsimile. We are holding eleven-dollar Norwegian water that tastes like a boardroom and trying to remember our opening line.

The Power Minimalist — Nothing. Deliberately nothing. A glass desk. A view. The unspoken suggestion that our idea should be grateful to be in the same room as the view.

All three are saying the same thing.

We have taste. Do you?

They arrive the way people arrive when they have somewhere more important to be. Phone face-down on the desk. The universal signal for you have 15-minutes and my unwavering attention — deployed by people who will check it twice before we finish our first sentence.

The Conference Room

Now there are five of them.

We don’t know who most of them are. There’s a Current Programming person. Someone from Business Affairs who shouldn’t be here but is. An assistant taking notes whose face tells us nothing.

The table is too long. We are at one end. The power is at the other.

This is not accidental.

The Zoom

The innovation the industry did not ask for and will never recover from.

We are pitching into a rectangle. A grid of rectangles. Each containing a person also watching themselves in a rectangle — which is its own psychological crisis nobody is addressing.

It is being recorded.

Mentioned casually. Almost as an afterthought.

Just so you know, we record all our meetings.

Somewhere on a server in Burbank there is a file of us pitching our life’s work to five rectangles — one of which was definitely driving for the first twelve minutes. We could tell. The background was moving.

Another rectangle was a closet. A real closet. With coats.

Someone’s dog walked through the frame. Nobody acknowledged it. Acknowledging it would mean acknowledging that we are all at home running a multimillion-dollar creative industry from rooms that smell like lunch.

The Pitch

We begin. We are good at this.

And then:

• Their eyes move to the phone. Just once.

• They write something down that may be a grocery list.

• They say interesting in a tone that means nothing.

• They say I love that in a tone that means less.

Then the comp titles.

Them: “So it’s like Succession meets The Bear?”

We think to ourselves: “Well, okay… but our show is about the Rwandan genocide”.

But, what we actually say: “That’s a really interesting lens”.

What we really mean: “We need this meeting”.

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The Pass

We will not hear it in the room.

Nobody passes in the room. The room is for warmth. The pass is for email. From their assistant. Sent at 7pm on a Friday. Which is Hollywood’s version of a breakup note under a windshield wiper.

Not quite right for us at this time.

The most dishonest sentence in the English language. It means one of the following:

• We didn’t understand it.

• We understood it and were afraid of it.

• We loved it and forgot about it.

• We never read it.

We will never know which one.

That is also by design.

Meanwhile — upstairs — they just greenlit a sequel to a sequel of a franchise based on a toy.

The toy is performing well internationally.

They are guessing. We are guessing. The entire industry is guessing — dressed in expensive clothes or sitting in coat closets — pretending any of it confers authority.

It does not.

It is eleven-dollar water and a fake plant and a recording nobody will ever watch.

The only difference between us and the person who just passed?

We are guessing in the direction of something we actually believe in.

That’s not a small difference.

That’s the whole game.

Walk in. Hold the water. Unmute ourselves.

Tell our story.

And when the Friday email arrives from the assistant —

understand it for what it is.

A guess.

From a frightened person.

In a fake-plant office or a too-long conference room or a Zoom closet full of coats.

Who definitely didn’t read it.

I remember the exact moment I knew.

Not the first time I held a camera. Not the first cut that actually worked. Not even the first time I sat in a dark theater watching something I made flicker to life on a screen.

It was earlier. It was the feeling of being called.

The way musicians describe hearing a song and understanding, in their bones, that this is the language they were built to speak. That’s what film was. Not a career choice. A recognition. A coming home to a place I’d never been.

I chased it. Got pretty good at it. Earned rooms I had no business being in and stayed long enough to learn what those rooms were actually about.

Development rooms. Sound stages. Conference rooms with views. I circled the c-suite long enough to understand exactly how decisions get made and what those people are actually afraid of.

And I was always, deeply, grateful I never wanted to be one of them.

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Here’s what nobody tells you about loving this industry.

The love doesn’t protect you from it.

There’s a line from The Offer — the Paramount+ series about the making of The Godfather — where a woman tells a young, starry-eyed kid the truth about all of us:

“We were all kids who left home at seventeen to go join the circus.”

That’s the whole origin story of everyone I’ve ever loved in this business.

The outsiders. The ones who didn’t fit the town they grew up in. Who found their way, improbably, stubbornly, to this pirate ship of an industry where the misfits made the culture and the weirdos told the stories and for the first time looked around and thought: I’m home.

We built families here. Real ones.

And then a small group of men in a small number of rooms decided our stories — noisy, questioning, inconvenient, alive — were worth less than a movie franchise based on a toy.

I want to be honest about what that did to me.

The inspiration didn’t die quickly. It curdled.

Inspiration became frustration. Frustration became anger. The productive kind — the kind that makes you write at 2am and refuse to accept the answer you’ve been given.

But anger is exhausting. Eventually, if the walls don’t move, it turns into something quieter and heavier.

Grief.

Not just for my career. But also, for the stories that didn’t get made. For the filmmakers I know who are brilliant and broke and grinding in a system that was never designed to sustain them.

For the circus. For what it was. For what it could have been.

Now, I build roadmaps.

Maps out of the system. Maps around it. I do it because I have a front row seat most people don’t — not because I’m exceptional, talented or know something nobody else does, but because I’ve been in enough rooms, on enough stages, to see the machinery clearly.

Here’s what I see.

The machinery is not broken. It’s working exactly as designed.

It was designed to concentrate power. Reward compliance. Produce content safe enough to greenlight and profitable enough to justify. It was never — not once, not in any boardroom I’ve been near — designed to serve the story.

That’s the sacred cow. Let me kill it here.

The industry was never on your side.

There were moments when the incentives aligned — when bold and original also happened to be what the market rewarded — and we called those moments the golden age. But the system didn’t build The Godfather. The pirates did. And the system took credit.

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So here is my best guess. The roadmap I keep rewriting at 3am.

Let’s stop trying to fix the system and let’s gets busy building the one that replaces it. now.

The tools to make, fund, and distribute work have never been more accessible. The audience relationship has never been more direct. The appetite — from people exhausted by content that treats them like a demographic — for actual storytelling has never been higher.

The window isn’t closing. It’s opening. From the other side.

What it requires is the one thing the system trained out of us.

We need to stop seeing ourselves as people who needs to be chosen. Start seeing ourselves as someone who chooses.

That’s the sword. The one that kills creative oppression. Not a petition. Not an open letter. The private, permanent, irreversible decision that your work does not require their permission to exist. This is the job of our resistance: to make the shift permanent.

We were kids who left home to join the circus. We found our people. We built something.

Now it’s time to remember what pirates do when the empire comes for the ship.

This industry is a bureaucracy of creative cowardice - dressed in the language of storytelling, decorated with the artifacts of taste, staffed by frightened people laundering guesses as vision - that spent fifty years extracting the labor and cultural capital of artists who loved something too much to walk away, and called that arrangement a dream.

The great films happened in spite of it.

Those films belong to us. That legacy belongs to us. And the next chapter, written outside the system, in rented houses and direct audience relationships and tools built by people tired of waiting —

that belongs to us too.

They don’t get to have it.

Not this time.

In my last post, I wrote about resolve.

About what it looks like when people decide, quietly and without ceremony, to build something instead of surrender.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Mostly because I’ve been living a much smaller, much less visible version of it — holed up with my creative partners doing the thing that nobody in this industry talks about with any honesty.

Development.

Real development. The kind where you get out of town, turn your phones mostly off, drink more coffee than is medically advisable, and spend three days staring at whiteboards and each other’s faces trying to figure out what you actually want to make and whether you have any business making it.

It’s not glamorous. It’s also, if you’re doing it with the right people, one of the best things in the world.

We’re circling three projects right now. I’m not going to tell you much about them yet — not because I’m being coy, but because half-baked ideas are like soufflés. You open the oven too soon and they collapse into something embarrassing and flat.

What I will say: one is a YA horror-comedy that I’m convinced is going to terrify and delight in equal measure. One is a techno-thriller anthology that takes a blowtorch to internet culture. And one is the project that probably scares me the most — something that leans directly into my documentary & journalism background, a project about how news gets made, and the long, slow way that machine helped grease our slide into this authoritarian shit-sandwich we’re in.

Three very different animals. We’ll pick one to go first with.

The process of narrowing it down has been, I won’t lie, genuinely joyful. There’s a particular kind of energy that happens when you’re in a room with people you trust — people who will tell you when an idea is bad, who argue with you because they care, who also know when to shut up and let something breathe. That doesn’t happen by accident. You earn those rooms. And when you’re in one, you feel it.

Here’s the other side of that pancake, though.

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The financial reality of making serious content right now is something, like most people, we’ve been staring directly in the face — not with dread, exactly, but with the particular sharpening focus of a chef who just realized there’s no cream and dinner’s in twenty-minutes.

The economics of the kind of projects we make are shifting fast. The windows are narrower. The buyers are spooked. The money that used to slosh around fairly freely has learned how to swim upstream.

And honestly? It’s been weirdly galvanizing.

Because when the conventional path closes, you start looking at the terrain differently. You stop asking “how do we get the system to fund us” and start asking “what can we build ourselves.”

Which is a much more interesting question.

Here’s where my particular career history starts paying unexpected dividends.

For a long time, I’ve been atom-smashing filmmaking and storytelling with digital platform development. Broadcast, studio, online — I’ve spent years living at the intersection of these things when most people in each camp thought the other was the enemy. That cross-wiring turns out to be useful in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

So, we’ve been quietly building tools. Real tools. Apps that help us with market research. AI agents that have automated tasks which used to eat weeks of our time, which now happen while we sleep, which means we get to spend our actual hours on the creative work — on the stories and the voices and the structure that no algorithm has figured out how to care about yet.

We have technology partners in San Francisco who are as genuinely good at this as anyone I’ve met, and between all of us, we’ve built things that have changed the way our little content shop operates. Things that make me think about what might be possible for other independent creators.

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I’m not going to say more than that right now. Again, not because I’m being precious — but, because it’s still cake batter. You’ll know when it’s done. And when it’s done or at least firmly outlined with some testing), I’ll share it widely and with enthusiasm, because I think there’s a real chance it’s actually useful to people trying to do what we’re trying to do.

Resolve doesn’t always show up with sirens and smoke.

Sometimes it shows up as three people in a rented house, arguing about story structure, building things nobody asked us to build, betting on ourselves with the particular stubbornness of people who have decided that the alternative is worse.

That’s where we are.

Stay close.

P.S. - Nothing I’m exploring with this new direction means I’m abandoning my mission of helping mid-career producers/directors/screenwriters in developing, packaging, pitching and selling their projects into this chaotic business… or helping them to find the escape path out.

Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, showrunner, journalist, and development executive. PitchCraft publishes dispatches from the intersection off storytelling, and the business of making things. Subscribe now and get updates and pitch playbooks in your inbox every week.

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We talked about why making a movie and selling a movie are two very different skill sets, and why so many talented filmmakers get stuck because they’ve never been taught how to pitch their work effectively.

We also got into some bigger ideas:

• Why I think the current studio gatekeeping model is screaming towards irrelevence
• How technology is reshaping the industry faster than most people realize
• What I call “Hollywood 2.0” — a shift where creators regain control of how projects get made and financed and distributed.
• And why, despite all the chaos, I think the best days of filmmaking are actually still be ahead of us

It was a really thoughtful conversation about where the industry is heading and what filmmakers should be preparing for right now.

If you’re interested in the future of filmmaking, pitching, or how creators navigate the next phase of this industry, give it a listen or feel free to schedule a Pitch Calibration Call here, where we can find out where you want to go with your current project, find out where the gap is it that’s holding you back from getting there and then creatiing a custom strategy that works in pitch rooms now.

I’d love to hear from you.

Link to the episode:

NonDē Uprising

Ep 019 - Alex LeMay on *Designing a Film Industry From Scratch in 2026*

It’s one thing to make a movie; it’s another to sell it. Alex LeMay’s Substack, Pitch Craft, helps creators pitch projects for funding. In addition to offering his own expertise on pitching to Hollywood studios, Alex is currently funding his own project openly sharing statistics and information to help fellow filmmakers see his process (how NonDe…

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5 months ago · 5 likes · Avi Setton and Alex LeMay

Four years ago, I was in Ukraine when the sky split open.

Not metaphorically. Not politically. Physically.

Sirens. Smoke. That metallic taste in the air after impact. Phones lighting up in dark apartments. People standing in doorways, not screaming — thinking.

I was there in the earliest days.

And what I saw wasn’t chaos.

It was decision.

No speeches. No flags. No cinematic heroics. Just ordinary people making a choice. We’re staying. We’re not handing this over. We’ll figure it out.

A woman downstairs made coffee while missiles fell.
A fixer texted me, “We work.”
A man in a hoodie started organizing supply runs before sunrise.

That was the birth of the resistance.

Not rage.

Resolve.

The headlines tried to explain it with arrows on maps.

They looked for troop movements and leverage and escalation.

I saw something else.

I saw bakers turning kitchens into supply lines.
Graffiti artists painting defiance onto the bones of bombed-out buildings.
Musicians playing in basements while generators rattled outside.
Filmmakers shooting interviews by flashlight because the power grid had other plans.

I didn’t see panic.

I saw creation.

Under pressure, people reveal themselves. And what Ukraine revealed was not fragility. It was fluency. An ability to pivot, to build, to improvise at speed.

There’s a particular stillness I came to recognize. Not calm. Not denial. Something steadier than that. A kind of muscular composure.

The jokes in the stairwells.
The cigarettes passed between strangers.
The dry humor in the middle of ruin.

I have never seen a people so untheatrical about their own courage.

They don’t perform it.
They live it.

They repair what can be repaired.
They mourn what cannot.
And then they get back to work.

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Four years later, I think about those first days often.

About the way resistance didn’t arrive with a trumpet blast. It arrived quietly, in kitchens and garages and train stations. In text messages. In small acts that added up to something immovable.

I went there with a camera. I left with something else entirely.

A respect that borders on awe.

A love that isn’t sentimental — it’s earned.

If you’ve ever wondered what steadiness looks like under fire, it looks like Ukraine. If you’ve ever wondered what dignity looks like when tested, it looks like Ukraine.

I was there when the resistance was born.

I watched it take its first breath.

And what I learned, standing in those streets, is something I’ll carry the rest of my life:

Creativity isn’t the thing we do after survival. It’s how survival happens.

Friends,

I’m back — and I want to tell you what changed.

As some of you know, over the past month, I stepped away to deal with PTSD. Long overdue. Being in Ukraine as long as I was — as many times as I was — and then trying to slide back into the industry like nothing had shifted… that’s not how the nervous system works. You can’t outrun that kind of accumulation. Eventually the the mind and body pay the bill.

Also, thank you! To the PitchCraft crew, the NonDE folks, and the wider Substack circle — the messages, the quiet check-ins, the blunt advice, the kindness… it meant more than I was capable of articulating at the time. I was a little underwater. You didn’t let me disappear.

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This treatment did something simple and brutal: it forced stillness.

And stillness is inconvenient.

If you sit in it long enough, the noise drops out. The ego drops out. The hustle drops out. What’s left is harder to ignore.

What I realized toward the end of my care and after all the personal stuff had been sorted to a degree, wasn’t that I’d become too strategic.

Strategy is my craft. I’ve seen it build careers. I’ve seen it rescue films from obscurity. I believe in it.

What I saw more clearly is that I had been deploying my strategy primarily in service of helping others navigate the machine — while not fully stepping into the arena myself under the new rules of the game.

I was teaching leverage.

But I wasn’t modeling it at the level this moment demands.

And that’s the shift.

Creativity is not decorative for me. It’s survival. In Ukraine, I’ve seen what it looks like when creativity is employed under crisis. It isn’t glamorous. It’s not a panel discussion. It’s oxygen. It’s problem-solving when the stakes are not theoretical.

But oxygen alone isn’t enough.

We need structure.
We need logistics.
We need distribution.

Artists don’t need less strategy.

They need strategy aligned with their own sense of independence.

So here’s what I’m doing.

I’m investing in my own content. A feature, a pilot, maybe some strange vertical experiment that makes my stomach tighten a little. Something that competes. Something that risks embarrassment.

And I’m building it publicly.

Not as a cleaned-up postmortem. Not as a victory lap. I’m going to show the friction — the revenue mechanics, the distribution plays, the wobble, the recalibration. The parts we usually hide because they’re not sexy or convenient for our sense of “Awesomeness”or ego.

Not as proof of concept.

As proof of conviction.

If I believe filmmakers don’t need to wait for permission, then I can’t keep advising from the balcony while still in close proximity to the industry as I have been. I have to jump.

Alongside that, I’m going to be far more intentional about sharing what I have — the relationships, my proximity to parts of the industry, the connective tissue, the infrastructure I’ve accumulated over the years.

I’ve said something similar to this before.

The difference now is that I’m capable of it.

Looking back, I wasn’t in a position to be generous in the way I wanted to be. I was running on fumes. You can’t extend your hand if you can barely lift it.

That’s changed, thank god.

It may be clumsy at first. I may overcorrect. I may misjudge timing. But I’m done hoarding access like it’s currency. If I know someone who can genuinely help you — and it makes sense — I’ll connect it. If there’s a revenue path that protects your voice instead of eroding it, I’ll map it out.

The old system isn’t collapsing dramatically. It’s rotting slowly. The corridors are narrower. The promises thinner. But that doesn’t mean opportunity is shrinking elsewhere (hello, creator economy).

It means leverage is moving from a quarter-of-a-billion dollar blockbusters to a $400 POC/conviction reel.

And I intend to be on the side of creators who understand that.

The clarity I gained about my career during my time away, wasn’t about abandoning the business.

It was about aligning my business with intention and the needs of others.

We can make films that matter.
We can build audiences without begging.
We can earn without surrendering our voice.

But not if we keep pretending the old gates will reopen.

We build.
We distribute.
We earn.
We refine.
We share our findings with others.
We repeat.

That’s the work.

I feel steadier than I have in a long time. Not euphoric. Not reborn. Just… aligned.

This next chapter isn’t theory for me.

It’s seat-of-your-pants deployment.

Let’s get uncomfortable…

…and…how can I help?

Gratefully,

Alex

P.S. - Over the next few Months, I’m going to open up the exact revenue architecture behind the project I’m building — audience acquisition, monetization stack, distribution sequencing. When I start building this in public, I’m going to involve a small group of filmmakers who are ready to execute, not theorize. If that’s you, we’ll talk.