Citizen Screen: Building a Filmmaking Revolution Through Green Team and Red Team Cinema
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At this year’s film festival, short film “Glampire” created marketing buzz with a real coffin on display. [/caption]
Citizen Screen is a monthly column dedicated to film and film-related topics, sourced and curated by Port Townsend Film Festival. This month’s column is by filmmaker Ross Pruden, a Port Townsend-based fine art landscape fine art photographer, but his film-related credits include NYU film school, London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, SAG member, Assistant Director, Screenwriter, and Script Supervisor.
Port Townsend will one day be a place to shoot feature films. Million-dollar budgets. Known actors. Movies shown at the Rose.
Not a crazy idea—Zachary Spicer of Pigasus Pictures has already shot seven union-sanctioned feature films in Bloomington, Indiana, a town about the same size as Port Townsend.
Spicer’s advice for those wanting to shoot features in small towns? “Build your own crew.”
Port Townsend is currently lacking a trained crew or reliable infrastructure, so visiting film studios would have to house their own talent, an expensive proposition given Port Townsend’s housing. Ideally, we want a complete film crew who already lives here to serve other film studios, but also to make our own movies.
Conveniently, Jefferson County has a dormant 4H Performing Arts category, which is a perfect excuse to teach all aspects of filmmaking—writing, acting, shooting, editing, and even marketing—to our next generation of filmmakers. 4H offers young children a low-risk opportunity to build up their confidence and make good presentations, all useful life skills for any workforce. Why not use it to make movies?
“Why go to Los Angeles when scenic Port Townsend is a perfect place to build our filmmaker community?”
— Ross Pruden
So I have a plan to make feature films in Port Townsend.
First, I have to take you on a detour. This is a short true tale of two companies—one massively successful company (“GREEN TEAM”, for financial stability), and a smaller newer company (“RED TEAM”, for financial risk).
The Dallas boardroom from the “Green Team” company invited the smaller “Red Team” company to discuss a possible acquisition, in 2000.
“How much do you think we should acquire you for?” asked one of the Green Team suits.
The $3 billion Green Team company was an ideal buyer for Red Team’s tiny service… if and only if Red Team could convince Green Team their company would benefit. Green Team had 9,000 retail stores, 65 million registered customers, 84,000 employees worldwide, and an annual revenue of $5.9 billion. Red Team had to nail this meeting.
Red Team’s CEO shifted in his seat. “I think our company is valued at $50 million.”
Green Team eventually declined, saying Red Team’s services were “too niche,” financially unprofitable, and serving different customer groups.
On the way home, Red Team was despondent. Then one of them said, “This just means we’re going to have to kick their ass.”
The Green Team was Blockbuster, and the Red Team was Netflix.
We all know what happened next: Netflix offered a subscription model with no late fees, and customers loved it. By the time Blockbuster matched Netflix’s no-late fee policy in 2005, Netflix had already captured a significant market share. Ten years after Netflix’s $50 million ask, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy. Today, Netflix’s market cap evaluation is $375 billion, and it is the 25th most valuable company in the world, besting Bank of America, Chevron, Coca-Cola… even Disney.
How could Blockbuster have blundered so badly? They had the stores, the market, the resources… they should have squashed Netflix. It comes down to the rate of innovation. Larger companies with lucrative revenue streams have no incentive to innovate, whereas smaller Red Team companies will do anything to get a foothold in the market; Red Team businesses always innovate more. With Red Team constantly iterating and pivoting, they eventually make a product “good enough” to compete with Green Team. Customers flock to the better competitor, and loyalty attrition often happens too fast for Green Team to keep up. This problem is addressed at length in the book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, with its stark moral: either you disrupt your own business, or someone else will do it for you.
The solution? Green Team companies must create a Red Team sub-division to disrupt Green Team’s business model without restrictions. If Red Team’s business model works better, Green Team adopts it.
Now you should understand my two-pronged approach: Simultaneously create a Green Team AND a Red Team.
Green Team filmmakers follow all the traditional rules, e.g., $1 million budgets, celebrities, paid crew, union jobs, etc… everything. Red Team will break any rules to tell stories in any medium to get eyeballs. Red Team would port professional filmmaking practices onto social media shorts, 2-minute documentary shorts, etc.; basically, anything new and innovative feature filmmakers won’t do because they would never get funding. While Green Team hires professionally trained crew, Red Team makes films so cheap that cast and crew can experiment and learn on the job… so they can one day work for Green Team. The two strategies, then, work in tandem.
The Port Townsend Film Festival and I both want to see a vibrant filmmaker community in Port Townsend, and 4H is how we build it from the ground up. Why go to Los Angeles when scenic Port Townsend is a perfect place to build our filmmaker community? Come join Green Team, Red Team, or even both!
Fill our our brief survey here: rosspruden.art/film
We look forward to exploring a variety of film and film-related topics in the months to come. Want to propose a topic? Send your thoughts to: info@ptfilm.org.
