Inside the Business of Documentaries, With an Oscar Winner w/ Odessa Rae

How do you pay for an Oscar-winning documentary on your own credit card? Why does the person carrying the legal and financial risk of a film get the least credit for it? And why does a $6 million film need an $18 million campaign to win Best Picture?

Odessa Rae is the Oscar-winning producer of Navalny, and she funded the first four months of it on her own credit card. She walks Poppy through how the money works, from who funds a film to who owns it at the end, and what winning an Oscar actually costs.

In this episode:
◼️ The $90,000 of credit card debt that funded the first four months of Navalny
◼️ How film financing actually works, from the investor's premium to the points on the back end
◼️ Why the IP of a film sits in its own company, and why an investor never owns a piece of it
◼️ Three days of Navalny's last interview sit in a vault, and the filmmakers have no right to them
◼️ Why the Best Picture Oscar goes to the producer, and why the industry still treats producers as staff
◼️ What an Oscar campaign really is, and why you fly to a city to screen for two voters
◼️ Why the money for an Oscar campaign has to be raised as donation rather than investment
◼️ What a film costs to make now, and why AI is pulling that number down every year
◼️ Why she was followed for six months after Navalny died
◼️ How she actually finds investors, and why she keeps the ones she likes

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