Radical Filmmaking with Emily Best
Do you feel like you see yourself and your friendships reflected in most TVs or movies? We sure don’t. Emily Best tells us why we won’t get more diverse representations of women on screen unless we change the way films and shows are funded and distributed — and how she plans to do just that.
►NYG Website / ►Apple Podcasts / ►Stitcher / ►Overcast / ►Player FM / ►PocketCasts / ►Breaker / ►acast
Emily is a producer, director, and the founder and CEO of Seed & Spark, a new crowdfunding and streaming platform that wants to change the way entertainment is made and distributed — so that independent creators can actually be independent. She started Seed & Spark after making her own first film, where she learned just how little Hollywood’s middlemen understood about reaching women.
I started thinking of all the movies I had ever watched and everything that was available to me and I was like, “where are my friendships? Where are the women I admire?” And they were nowhere to be found. And so, that summer we started toying with the idea of making a movie that would represent female friendships the way that we understood them. And I didn’t know that this was a radical idea.
We talk about:
- Why the film industry doesn’t see women as a viable audience (spoiler: they’re wrong about that).
- Using a wedding registry website to create a crowdfunding campaign for her first film.
- Why Seed & Spark is the only streaming service with a pay-what-you-can model — and a community where creators and fans build real connection.
- Why algorithmic content recommendations — a la Netflix — lead us to an unsatisfying place (and how to change that).
- The importance of creating a code of conduct for online communities — _before_ you’ve got trolls and Nazis.
- Fck Yes!, a webseries about consent that shows what happens when people actually talk in the bedroom — and how awkward moments can turn into extremely sexy ones.
- What’s next for Emily: A documentary project about the Equal Rights Amendment (which is still not ratified).
Follow Emily: Twitter | Medium
Plus: Sara and Katel get real about their own failures when it comes to diversifying who’s involved in what, and talk about their fave subject: female friendship (and donuts).
By doing the thing that was easy, which was bringing in somebody who was already connected to us, who we knew would be a good fit, we weren’t able to think about the benefits of bringing in somebody from a different background.
— Sara
☞ And there’s always a full transcript.
This episode of NYG is brought to you by:
