Jean Prewitt is a powerful advocate for the independent film and television industry. She is chief executive of the Independent Film & Television Alliance, and she brings three decades of expertise in legal affairs and international business to the job, along with an understanding of how to apply technology and a dry wit.
She took over what had been the American Film Marketing Association in 2000 at a turning point for the motion picture industry’s economy, and she oversaw the expansion and modernization of the 160-member organization, as well as its 2004 name change from AFMA to IFTA.
That same year, Prewitt joined the board of the region’s revamped film office, FilmLA Inc., successor to the scandal-ridden Entertainment Industry Development Commission. Prewitt became chairwoman last month.
Prior to joining the independent film organization, Prewitt served for nearly a decade as a senior official with U.S. Department of Commerce and later as a lobbyist for the high-tech and entertainment industries.
Staying tech-savvy is as easy for Prewitt as gathering the family at the dining table: Husband Michael Fitch is chief executive of the tech trade group, PCIA The Wireless Infrastructure Association, and 15-year-old daughter Susannah is a budding tech whiz.
Question: How does someone who started her career as an antitrust litigator end up running an entertainment industry trade group?
Answer:
My first job was at a big New York law firm, Donovan Leisure Newton and Irvine, handling securities and anti-trust and tax litigation. A year and a half into that, in 1976, I was asked to come to California as part of a team doing a huge piece of litigation for Universal Studios. It was part of first batch of investment tax credit litigation aimed at validating that the film industry was entitled to take the investment tax credit.
Q: And the rest was history?
A:
It was five years before the litigation was settled. We opened an office here and I handled a number of pieces of litigation for both Universal and Disney. When Universal, Paramount and MGM created United International Pictures, which became the biggest worldwide film distributor, they asked me to come over as general counsel. I went to Europe and was there nine years.
Q: What made you return to the U.S.?
A:
I went back to Washington to work for the part of the U.S. Department of Commerce that provided telecommunications advice to the White House.
Q: Nice timing?
A:
I was incredible lucky. In 1990, not only were issues of convergence becoming important because of the Internet, but also Communism was being overthrown in Europe. So our agency took a lot of delegations to Europe to give these countries guidance on how to privatize their telecommunications and broadcasting systems. I eventually shifted over to a lobbying firm in 1994. I represented the Motion Picture Association of American and a lot of high-tech companies. There was a temporary segue in 1999 into a business called YouBet.com that did online horse racing. Then in 2000 I came to this organization, which was then called the American Film Marketing
Association.
Q: When you took the job at the association in 2000, what needed to be changed or updated?
A:
Our use of technology. Our Web site was pretty static. The association produces the standard forms and agreements for rights all over the world and is used by everybody outside the major studios. We were still sending all of our material out in giant white binders, so the first thing we did was create a more functional Web site, and put all of that material on it.
Q: Weren’t your members asking for that already?
A:
At that time, the vast majority of our members didn’t use e-mail to conduct business, let alone have their own Web site. Remember, 40 percent of our membership is not in the United States, and might not have had the same access to the Internet as we in the U.S. do. This is still a very face-to-face business, and people were still doing all their deals totally at markets. Once they embraced technology, they embraced it totally, though. Now everyone is pretty much wired.
Q: What other things are your association doing differently?
A:
A lot of what we do now is a cleaner and more-targeted version of what the association was created to do. In the 1980s, the main job was to push information to members in volume. If you were about to do your first deal in Greece, you’d want to know what that market was about. Both the MPA and AFMA published huge compendiums of information that would tell how many movie theaters there were and what the admissions price was. Now this information is available over the Internet.
Q: So what are members looking for?
A:
What people appreciate is our ability to personalize it. We get a lot of calls like, “My buyer in this country wants me to sell him the rights in France as well as the rights in English. Does that make sense?” What they need is someone of the other end of the phone, with access to this kind of arcane information, who can say, “Yes, we’ve heard from 10 other companies doing this sort of thing.”
Q: What makes the data you provide different than provided by other organizations or companies?
A:
We collect and publish the box office results for every single, solitary picture that’s being distributed outside the United States. Other companies do that, but they often don’t collect info for the independent films, or the local films in that market.
Q: How would a member use that information?
A:
We started an online filmography service three years ago. Say you’re thinking of casting Julianne Moore in a film. You could stick her name in and see precisely how well every one of her films over the last five to seven years has performed in Singapore.
Q: How has the composition of your membership changed?
A:
The association started out as an organization of sales agents who didn’t produce. They’d pick up product from independent producers and represent it abroad. Now nearly all of our members do at least some production.
Q: Why the shift?
A:
Over the years, more and more companies got into production to be sure they’d have better product flow. So we’ve done substantial advocacy concerning tax incentives for production. We really pushed the federal tax incentives that passed 18 months ago. We’ve been very active in the U.K. on their incentives, and in various states in the U.S. on their incentives. We also have expended our yearly producer conferences here in L.A.
Q: What’s the main message at these conferences?
A:
Understand what your buyers want before you commit to major production decisions. The industry now is extremely tight and it’s extremely global.
Q: What do you mean by tight?
A:
Up until a couple years ago, your rich husband, or your grandfather financed independent films, or you pre-sold the picture. You’d take your concept, with one or two pieces of talent hopefully attached, you’d go to one of the major markets, approach buyers and say, “What would you guarantee me as a price if I actually produced this film?” You’d get these signed pre-sales and take them to the bank for collateral to get up to 80 percent of production money. When everything fell apart in 2000-2001, pre-sales stopped being as lucrative. These days you’re lucky to get 50 percent of your financing from pre-sales.
Q: How do you make up that 50 percent?
A:
You have to find a co-producer who has some equity financing, find some production tax incentives or cobble together a series of other financial pieces.
Q: How has this affected the creative side of the industry?
A:
In a huge way. If you have a French co-producer, you need a concept that’s going to sell in France. If you’re looking for U.K. incentives, it might involve using a U.K. director. You better have a product that’s going to work. It can’t just be a flier or your passion project that you hope someone will want to watch.
Q: What has been the impact of major studios acquiring or creating their own independent studios?
A:
From the sales agent point of view, you’ve got these studio arms competing for the same projects as our members, but with a very different financial structure. They also are displacing what we would consider true independent product in distribution. That’s particularly true when a studio has an output deal, where a distributor has agreed to take whatever the studio sends it at a pre-negotiated price.
Q: For most of its history, the Independent Film and Television Alliance was known by a different name. Why the switch?
A:
The association originally was known as American Film Marketing Association. By the time that I got here, 40 percent of the membership was not based in the U.S. The name was really a sore spot for a big chunk of our membership. We needed a name that eliminated the link to America, emphasized the independence of our members and made clear that we were involved in television, too.
Q: Since 2004, you’ve held your market concurrently with the American Film Institute’s festival. How did that come about?
A:
Producers thought their smaller European art house pictures were getting lost in our market, because it was so focused on U.S. films. A $4 million picture in Italy is huge, but in the U.S. you’re lucky if a $4 million picture goes to TV. They needed a better showcase. The solution was that we needed a film festival. The AFI’s fit our profile U.S.-centric, but very focused on international films. We had conversations with them and they were more than willing to create a linkage.
Q: What have been the benefits of this partnership?
A:
Our members’ films that are in competition at the festival get seen by the public, seen by the press and get reviewed. So buyers are able to see how a film that they might not ordinarily be interested in does in front of an audience.
Q: How does it work for the AFI?
A:
It’s valuable for the producers in competition to have exposure to the commercial side that we at the market provide.
Q: You recently became chairwoman of FilmLA Inc., successor to the Entertainment Industry Development Commission, which was reorganized after a financial and bribery scandal. What led you to get involved?
A:
The industry really needed to demonstrate that they were committed to keeping this organization alive. It would have been just as easy for the city to distance itself and let it go away, so we all stepped up as organizations to participate in the restructuring.
Q: What are you doing differently?
A:
The most significant thing we’ve done is take back the responsibility for notifying a neighborhood that a production is going to be filming. The production companies don’t know the neighborhoods and their tendency was to not notify a broad-enough area. Since FilmLA took back notification less than a year ago, complaints have dropped 50 percent. We’ve also taken over all the permitting for the L.A. Unified School District, which has been a nice source of revenue for them.
Q: Is FilmLA using technology to better get the word out?
A:
It won’t be ready until late fall, but then it will be possible for companies to apply for permits online. It will also allow other interested parties, such as councilmembers’ offices, to find out quickly what’s going on in their districts.
Q: Is your 15-year-old daughter Susannah one of your touch-stones about where technology is heading?
A:
She’s great. She’s never seen a piece of electronics she can’t operate. I had to leave the (FilmLA) launch party the other night because I only leave her on MySpace for “X” period of time by herself. A 15-year-old shows you what the next phase of the world is going to be like.
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Jean Prewitt
Title:
Chief executive
Organization:
Independent Film & Television Alliance
Born:
1948, Oklahoma City
Education:
A.B. in economics, Harvard University; J.D. at Georgetown University Law Center
Career Turning Point:
Agreeing to be part of a team at a New York law firm that worked on major tax litigation for Universal Studios
Most Admired Persons:
Eleanor Roosevelt, Eugene McCarthy
Personal:
Married, one daughter and one stepdaughter
Hobbies:
Collecting 20th century Japanese prints; reading murder mysteries
